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May 8th – In the evening we returned to Snook’s at 5 PM for happy hour. Bruce was our waiter and we were his first ever customers. Bruce did fine and so did we with cheap beers and excellent food. We ate chicken wings, shrimp, jalapeno poppers, and cheese stuffed olives. Then finishing with Edy’s ice cream we had a complete balanced diet for once. May 9th - At 8 Am we went in to Key Largo for breakfast at DJ’s Diner. This is a must stop on your itinerary. We found the best complete breakfast menu of everything American. (There was no sheep’s tongue, pig’s feet souse, boiled fish or fish soup on the menu.) The food and the service were both top notch. We really enjoyed this place. We had the waitress, Chris, take our picture against the 70’s mural on the wall. After we crawled out of the restaurant Kay and Mary went to the Mail Boxes Etc. to send email. I bought a newspaper and had comic strips for the second day in a row. Matt and Sue stopped at Eckerd’s and Bob and I wandered through the bookstore. We finally finished our business and returned to the boats. We raised anchors and moved on down the ICW. Today we only had a few short travels through narrow channels. The rest was in open areas where we could sail out of the channel and stay clear of the powerboats, which we did at every opportunity. Today we saw more power boats than we had since Monday. They made the ICW lanes obvious with the wakes full of churned up sand and silt. The channels here are very shallow. You would never want to try this with any boat over 4-1/2 foot draft. We often saw less than 6-foot depth and a few times the depths were less than 5 foot. Frequently the depth was greater outside the channel. We were able to sail most of the way to Islamorada. There was one channel through the mangroves where we lost all wind and had to motor. We sailed into the anchorage at Islamorada and anchored in about 7 feet of water. Then we took a dinghy ride into World Wide Sportsman. This is the most complete fishing store you could find. We bought a few items and then traveled over to the Lorelei bar. We were in time for happy hour and took full advantage of the $1.25 beers. When happy hour was over we returned to the boats for dinner. May 10 - Today we went into Islamorada for lunch at the Islamorada Fish Company. This restaurant is outdoors and has a good seafood menu. Everything was delicious although a bit pricey. The help was very friendly and service was great. We topped dinner with Key Lime Pie covered in chocolate ice cream bars from the fish store. Later we had a happy hour on Gettinair. There was also a party going on shore at one of the beach side homes. Suddenly we saw a stretch limo going across the bay! Someone had put a stretch on some kind of hull so it looked like the car was driving on the water! The limo "drove" to the beach house and we think it must have been part of a wedding party. We had a lot of discussion during happy hour about the choices of routes and stops from here on. We thought about going to Long Key or to Marathon as the next stop before going on home. We also reviewed the weather forecast for the coming week. It seemed the best winds would be tomorrow with diminishing winds in the next days. There is also a high pressure over Florida and we can expect less wind as we approach the high. Since our route would be mostly downwind, either a broad reach or running, we decided to take the best wind we could. As a result we are leaving tomorrow early and trying to go as far as we can before the wind dies. We will sail overnight and then if we aren’t too tired we will continue on home. Else we will stop at one of the anchorages along the way. (But not Little Shark River.) Having made this decision we broke up the party and went to our boats for a good night’s sleep. Of course this being Saturday night we had a lot of boaters leaving late from Lorelei’s beach bar and making a lot of noise. But by dark the boaters disappeared and we listened to the music from the beach house as the party rocked on. May 11th - At 8:00 AM we left the anchorage. The breeze was a delightful 10-15 knots from the SE. We motor sailed through Steamboat Channel and then through Bowlegs Channel. I felt we should get an hour of charge on the batteries before turning the engine off. Then we were into Florida Bay and having a really good sail. We turned north at Long Key and soon we passed through Yacht Channel Cut. As we approached Sprigger Bank we kept well to the east of the marker and found much deeper water. By the time we reached Sprigger Bank the wind was already dying and our speed was down to less than 4 knots. We started the engine. I was hoping to maintain about 6 knots and to Pass Cape Sabel and all the crab traps before dark. By the time we reached Cape Sabel the wind had all but died and we had to furl the jib. As it turned out there were very few crab traps compared to the trip down. We motored on through the afternoon and left Cape Sabel behind in the late afternoon. We reached Cape Romano around 10 PM under a ¾ moon, and soon had lights of Marco Island in view. Day 73 – Monday, 12 May. We finally reached Marco about 2 AM. From then on we had city lights on our right. We hadn’t planned to motor at night because of the crab traps. But there was no wind and we weren’t content to just sit there. We couldn’t see any crab traps in the dark so we just assumed there were none. Kay and I took turns napping. Once, as I was getting ready to go below, there was a single small light on the horizon. We discussed what to do if we had to maneuver around another boat, and assumed it was a fisherman. When I came back on deck Kay was wired. She had the binoculars out and there were lights all over the horizon. She said she had a boat going right, a boat going left, and one she couldn’t figure out. Oh, by the way, she said, the little light turned out to be a big sailboat anchored (5 miles offshore) and she couldn’t see what it was until we were right on top of it. As she caught her breath, I tried to catch up with the action. Its now about 4 AM and there is a fleet of shrimp fishermen cruising back and forth offshore south of Fort Myers. There was one boat ahead of us that was ablaze with lights. All I could make out was a green light on top. I assumed he was proceeding right to left across our bow, but the bearing wasn’t changing. So I turned 10 degrees right and finally it looked like we would cross. Then I saw a second green light below the first. We kept closing and I could make out more details on the boat. I was convinced he was turning away from us. Then when he was less than a quarter mile away, I saw a dark shape on the near side of the lighted part of the boat. Just as the green light winked out and the red light winked on, I realized I was looking right at the bow of the boat. It’s a good thing the shrimp boats travel very slowly when they are dragging nets. We crossed his bow with about a tenth of a mile to spare. Then we were through the fleet and the way was clear. We were approaching Sanibel Island as the sun rose. Kay took more sunrise photos as I drank a fresh cup of coffee. With the sunrise we found a slight breeze of about 3 to 4 knots. We made it to Redfish Pass at 9 AM. Then I increased the throttle until we were making almost 7 knots. We took the Jug Creek short cut. As we passed the last two markers before going into I went too far to the east and almost ran aground. Wouldn’t this be great to go this far and get stuck here? Fortunately, the tide was up about 1.5 feet so we just bumped a couple times and our speed carried us over. Finally as we rounded mark 5 the wind picked up a little and we had an assist to our engine power as we motor sailed up the harbor. We arrived at our dock in Punta Gorda at 1:20 PM. We had covered 170 miles in 29-1/2 hours. All but two hours of this final leg was spent motoring. We were sure glad to be home, but we have many wonderful memories of a great trip. We were gone 73 days and traveled 1194 nautical miles. We are ready to go again. (But maybe not right away.)
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