All Fixed and Back to the East Coast

Pictures: Heidi and brother Jim in Cape Canaveral; vegetable selection at LaBelle grocery store on the Caloosahatchee River; bridge tender manually moves a turnstile on this bridge to open it at Slim's Fish Camp, near the Okeechobee; our dinghy has collected a crop of floating fresh water greens near the Okeechobee; Ken and Mark, our mechanic at Marco River Marina, almost done with the reinstallation; Ken got a good shot of an alligator as usually you only see two eyes and its nostrils. 

The transmission got put back in on Monday, March 5, and we took a test run later that day.  It has been two weeks since then and all is well. Even the weather has changed to just sunny and comfortable from hot and humid.

We have been to Naples and Cape Coral since getting back on track, and have completed the “circumnavigation” of South Florida by traveling through the Okeechobee lake and canal route back to the east coast ICW. Several adventures later we are happy to be heading for home, although it will be another 1450+ miles to Duxbury!

We visited with Josie Stephens in Naples, walked through the beach community near the City Dock, and out onto the long pier there that juts into the ocean. Cousin Connie Eshbach and John Diggin have a condo in Cape Coral and are very near to a lovely basin – Bimini Basin – where you can anchor and access quite a few resources. We had breakfast with Connie and John, and the day before had watched the setup of two television stations’ reporters in a small park there, showcasing a new man-made beach. Connie and Heidi speculated on why the beach is referred to as a “non-swimming beach”. Alligators were one idea we came up with.

On the Caloosahatchee-Okeechobee route (took a while to learn how to say and spell this!) we caught glimpses of the vast sugar cane industry there.  In a grocery store the other shoppers were just as likely to look like they were from Central America and many were guys wearing cowboy hats; the skyline in several directions had large towers of smoke clouds which we learned were from the burning of the cane stalks (after processing?).

Wildlife was abundant, and we saw what we thought was a mink, swimming across the canal in front of us and stopping to make a lot of noise every 30 seconds of so.  We passed two owls in a nest at the side of the canal looking back at us, the first owls we’ve seen. There were about a half-dozen alligators in the side canal we stopped in for the afternoon one day.  And in the same place several colorful birds were in the mangroves, some we had not seen before on our trip. (Back in Cape Coral we saw a bald eagle with some catch in its talons.)

We definitely had our worst night of the trip, so far, in the area west of Lake Okeechobee, near Moore Haven. We got bombarded by bugs, zillions of them, and lots of them made it through our defenses to bother us after dark. Ken kept getting up to find what he could and kill them, Heidi tried covering completely with a sheet but that made it stifling and the buzzing continued anyway. Morning couldn’t come too soon. We found piles of dead bugs everywhere outside the boat, especially on the decks and near the ports and windows. It took two separate cleanings to get rid of them.  We are now gun-shy and take bug spray with us everywhere we go; we haven’t recovered yet!

Most recently we’ve been to Stuart, Vero Beach, Eau Gallie and Cape Canaveral.  All nice places with good city moorings, easy anchoring  or inexpensive marinas. While walking on shore we got caught in a rainstorm in Vero Beach, took shelter in a park gazebo, and soon made friends with the two men and two boys on bicycles who also “huddled” there. Every once and a while it would start to let up and one of the boys would go out for a football pass thrown by one of the men, then it would start pouring again. In the end we had to jog back about a half mile to our dinghy in the rain and got soaked.

We saw Ian and Marlene from GUST O’ WIND for a visit last week and yesterday we spent most of the day with Heidi’s brother Jim and his wife Riko, residents of Cape Canaveral. We went “home” with some freshly baked quiche and a folding beach cart they no longer need.

The future brings, hopefully, continued good weather and a fairly straight line north to the Georgia-Florida border. And a few nice fresh fish for dinner. We have some frozen squid for bait and we are determined to find fish this afternoon!