Departed Casey Key Fish House dock 11:00, southbound on ICW, after paying Jimmy the owner $100 for the four nights of docking and electrical connection -- he offered us advice about the Keys, saying we absolutely must go gunkholing in the thousand islands area -- we will have to try that another time, though -- tomorrow and Wednesday are supposed to be low-impact, but Thursday the weather is supposed to start ramping up. We want to be tucked in safely by then. Anchored at Useppa Island (near Sanibel) to go outside tomorrow morning. Pictures to follow...

As we headed south, we encountered nice little bungalows such as those we'd already been seeing:


But a first for me, we also encountered signs on offshoots of the waterway, warning "non-owners" not to enter:


I've read on Salty Southeast Cruisers' Net that on the East Coast ICW there are even chains across some of these offshoots to prevent non-owners from entering. Seems inconvenient and somehow counter to the intent of the ICW, but I guess it's the equivalent of the gated community -- as long as our taxes are not paying for any of the "private" waterway upkeep or dredging...

We continued to find the occasional poor soul whose sense of what kind of wake he's leaving is impaired -- or perhaps it's the dreaded condition, "Recto-cranial inversion." Not clear, although some cases argue one way (they slow down from on a plane to exactly the maximum wake displacement speed) and others, the other (don't care, looka my engines, whoosh).


In a narrow channel with hard walls, a wake like this one can "reverb" for some minutes. Even out in the open, we encountered a LOT of powerboats leaving serious wakes for all to deal with. We listened to a distress call from Mile Marker 5, asking for an ambulance and TowBoatUS assistance, as an older woman had been thrown into something and injured her back due to a carelessly huge wake from a passing M/V.

This one didn't LOOK that bad in the picture but knocked down the most stuff:


On the same topic, the next morning we listened to M/V Evelyn Gail confirming their lunch reservations at Useppa Island as we were leaving that anchorage. About an hour later, they passed us without slowing for anything. Guess they were running late for lunch...


Cape Haze has an interesting system. Instead of having swing bridges, they have little tugboats pushing barges that ply the ICW along a short strip, ferrying the cars and trucks from the island to the mainland and back. There are several of these. the first picture shows the first tug we encountered, offloading its cars on the east bank. The second is the waiting line of cars on the west bank at the ramp. The third picture shows two of them crossing, one putting in at the east bank while the other returns to a different ramp on the west bank.






Continuing on a bit, we encountered a prettily sun-painted house, but the house was for sale:


Workboats abound as we get farther south. Interestingly, there were very few workboats in the Tampa-Sarasota area (mostly pleasure craft), a lot up in the Pensacola-to-Apalachicola area, and now again as we get into the Sanibel area, we see more working on the water:


At Mile 34.1, this abandoned bridge (now used as a fishing pier) parallels the new bridge from Placida to the N end of Gasparilla Island. The powerboats we encountered here were very reasonable :-)


It's GOOD to have friends! As we headed into Gasparilla Sound, these guys came the other way -- a motor mishap while fishing rescued by a good buddy with big engines, willing to tow ya home again.


After we finished making circles in Gasparilla Sound (to recalibrate the autopilot), Derek and Grant set up the gear for anchoring out. We use a bridle Derek made to allow the boat to rise more easily bows-on to the wind or current, rather than fishtailing.


Anchorage at Useppa had nine boats, including one from Steve Colgate's Offshore Sailing School, and a couple that looked pretty salty (windscoops, burgees, jerry cans, solar and wind power). One of those sounded the conch horn at 5:35 pm...


It took a while to get the anchorage just right, we didn't want to get into anyone's space. Finally, we were settled in safely and the windscoop rigged (but ready to shut the hatches in case of showers, which happened a few times between then an 11 pm). Peaceful place:


During the night the current shifted and we were facing the island directly, rather than facing back up the waterway as we had been. The wind direction had little to do with which way we faced, the current was strong. We only faced the two directions, however, so there was no problem with the bridle/rode twisting as you can sometimes get in a current-driven anchorage.

In the morning, we discovered the name of the salty boat that had blown the conch for sundown: Panacea.


And then we left for Key West, but you can read about that in the next entry.