Naples to Fort Myers Beach

We had left the boat safe and sound in a slip at Naples Sailing and Yacht Club while we spent a week with family in Delaware (with a quick trip home to Eastport thrown in). Normally we only stay at marinas if it's very cold and we need to plug in our little heater (like after Thanksgiving at the start of our trip) or if we have to leave the boat for any length of time and we want to be sure it's safe and plugged in to power at a dock to keep the batteries topped up. While at anchor or on a mooring ball our solar panels work just fine to throw amps into the batteries. But you need to be around to move the boom away from the panels (which are mounted on the bimini) to allow them to stay exposed to the sun. If you're not there to move the boom, or it's not sunny enough, you need to either run the engine or plug into shore power.

When we got back to Naples, we decided to leave the next day and sail further north rather than stick around. Before flying home, we'd borrowed a couple of bikes from the yacht club for an afternoon of biking through the old Naples historic district, along the beach, out to the Pier and through many upscale residential neighborhoods. Naples struck us as a very attractive city for people interested in very large vacation homes, golf courses, high-end boutiques, award-winning restaurants and other attractions, but it wasn't quite our idea of a place to spend a lot of time.  So we decided to move on. I did take one photo of the beautiful and super pricey Hinckley picnic boat that was our next door neighbor at the yacht club. We'd seen this very same boat before, in Southwest Harbor Maine at the Hinckley yard. I think its sort of silly that the boat's name is "Hinckley". It would be like calling our boat "Pacific Seacraft".  Next time I'm in Southwest Harbor I'm going to go ask Hinkley Yachts about that.

The morning we left Naples we had a rough time getting out of the yacht club due to very low water. Low tide there is bad enough but with a full moon and wind that had pushed the water out the bay, we got stuck hard aground in the narrow channel leading around the yacht club slips. A police boat hauled us out the channel and we bumped hard on the bottom several times before getting to deeper water.

We had a beautiful sail the whole way up the coast to Fort Myers Beach, our next destination.  The weather has been gorgeous for several weeks and our time at Fort Myers Beach, where we are now, has been wonderful as a result. Below is a view of the shrimp boats along the northeastern shore of Matanzas Pass where the huge mooring field in located.  A mooring ball here is only about $16 a day, with access to showers and a laundry room. There's a good dinghy dock with a free trolley stop a few steps away.  We lucked out when we arrived, grabbing a mooring ball very close to the dinghy dock. The current in the narrow Matanzas Pass is wicked, running at 2-3 knots and spinning the boat 180 degrees every six hours when the tide changes. Although there is a nearby anchorage, since we spend a lot of time off the boat, being on a mooring ball relieves us of the worry of dragging anchor in a high current, or having someone else drag into our boat.  

Fort Myers Beach is clean, colorful and affordable with a population that spans all ages. There are lots of restaurants, bars and shops selling touristy stuff, but there's also an amazing library and a great public transportation system.

The beach is of course packed with people and we haven't really spent much time there. We did take a walk one day and ran into a family building a huge sand castle.

The pedestrian plaza and center of town is called Times Square...

This VW bus was in mint condition, with the original louvered windows, impeccable chrome, a professional hallucinogenic paint job and the license plate "TRIPN-66".

The library, where I'm writing this post with my Mac and phone plugged into the wall, is huge and really a gorgeous building.  Among it's other attributes is an entire room of used books for sale (shown below), all neatly organized by topic and author's name.

 There is a welcome message near the kid's section, written in sand and shells...

This is the entryway, painted to look like an aquarium.  If you haven't cottoned onto it by now, I'm a big fan of public libraries :-)

Back in the mooring field, there is a nearby pirate ship that takes passengers on noisy expeditions out the channel to the open Gulf of Mexico for an afternoon or evening ride. Lots of kids visit their grandparents here at Fort Myers Beach and I'm sure this ride is a big hit with visiting families.

Those shrimp boats again, seen from Neverland's cockpit, wine glass in hand, watching the sun set.

 Up close, some of the shrimp boats have clearly seen better days!

 This is the trolley stop near the dinghy dock.

 I'm jumping around a bit with these photos! Neverland again and more pink cotton candy clouds.

This part of the west coast of Florida is famous for shells, especially on nearby barrier islands like Sanibel and Captiva. Yesterday we took the trolley all the way south to Lover's Key State Park, thinking there might be more shells there than on the closer beaches that have more human traffic.  We found a few interesting shells, but not many. We were told that some very avid shell hunters get 24-hour permits to access the State Park beach and they show up as early as 4 am with headlamps!!! Someone said that by 7 or 8 am the whole beach has been picked clean of interesting shells. Wow.

Anyway, we did see some sand sculptures...

And some hilarious birds that my friend Sara identified as Royal Terns. She calls them the punk rocker birds of the beach.

As you can see here, the beach was pretty deserted, the very fine, white sand is perfect to stroll on, and the water, though not the stunning color of the water in the Bahamas, is clean and very pretty.

There's a restaurant nearby called Doc Ford's, pictured here. Lately I've been reading the murder mysteries written by the local owner of this restaurant, whose main character is named "Doc Ford". The stories take place on Sanibel, Captiva, in the Ten Thousand Islands and other parts of the west coast.  Sort of trashy novels sometimes but also interesting because the author weaves in lots of details of the history, culture, geography, weather, etc in this part of Florida - descriptions of places I've seen lately or will see very soon!

Time for lunch. Catch you later :-)