Yesterday started out well enough. We woke up in a quiet harbor in venice, FL. Although it turns out it was a watersports area and we probably weren't supposed to anchor there.
We left venice and cruised down to Boca Grande. This sounded like a lovely place. In fact we have friends with a vacation house on the gulf side so it must be nice.
We hated it.
First the channel is ridiculously long and for next to no reason. We were going to go out to the channel entrance but we kept seeing boat after boat ignore the channel completely. Finally we cut the channel in half and had no problems at all.
We just happened to catch the channel on the way to low tide. Since Charlotte harbor is such a massive body of water there is a massive amount of water that must move through this opening at tide changes. We are estimating the current to have been around 3mph. It took us forever to get into the bay.
On the way in there were hundreds of crabs swimming by and fishing boats were scooping them up left and right. We also so some kind of hawk/falcon dive into the water, come up with a nice size fish, circle around our boat, and then carry his prize over the crowd of fishing boats just to rub it in their face. Pretty awesome.
So not all bad until we pulled into a little cove on Cayo Costa just south of Boca Grande. We were dying to swim after traveling all day. The water was cloudy and dirty. We inner-tubed to shore and were greeted with a lovely smell, sea urchins, wasps, and best of all deer flies.
We hauled it back to the boat after discovering what looked like the path a large creature took to drag it kill back into the mangroves. Only slightly exaggerating.
We got back on the boat and motored almost a mile off shore. Still fighting off a deer fly we anchored for the night.
That night, right at sunset, we were treated to a doozy of a storm. We heard about it on vhf, comfirmed with weather apps, and started securing everything.
We got rocked pretty hard slamming into oncoming waves and trying to stop the inflow of water through our hatchboards and top hatch.
After what seemed like much longer than it was the storm subsided. The rest of the night was better but still restless due to the strong current and strong winds fighting over which one would control the boat.
It's the next morning now and we are headed to Sanibel. Hopefully this experience will be better.
No comments:
Post a Comment