Exploring our new home

Where did I leave off... ah yes... we arrived on the West coast of Florida.

The Okeechobee waterway ends in Ft. Myers. Since the cross state transit was not part of the original itinerary we arrived without cruising guides or plans. We anchored off of  Ft. Myers municipal marina, which provides dinghy dock, laundry and showers for $5 a day, with a friendly smile. Their store didn't have the cruising guides we were looking for so we placed an order with Armchair Sailor  for the West coast version of the two cruising guide/ chartbooks which were most helpful on the ICW: Skipper Bob's Cruising the Gulf coast, and Intracoastal waterway: Miami to Mobile. After some reading we decided to head up Pine Island Sound and spend a couple of days at Cayo Costa State Park.


View Ft. Myers to Port of the Islands in a larger map

After Cayo Costa we headed South and spent two nights on a Ft. Myers beach mooring. Ft. Myers beach is a great kitchy throwback beach - a little bit rough and dirty but accessible, not yet gentrified by the surrounding area. Best of all a large portion of the beach allows dogs on leash and provides trash cans and bags at regular intervals. The Ft. Myers beach mooring field is between the barrier island of Estero, which the beach is on, and San Carlos island, where the fishing boats tie up. We had a great cocktail hour at Bonita Bill's, where dogs are welcome, the beer comes in a pitcher with a bag of ice to keep it cold and the shrimp are right off the boat.

Thus ended our "vacation". We left Ft. Myers beach and had the best sail of the trip 15 knots of wind on the beam with all sails raised.  But the sail ended too soon. We headed back inshore At Gordon Pass and followed the old ICW behind Keewaydin Island and Marco Island exiting at Coon Key pass. On the way we spent a wonderful night behind Keewaydin in Rookery Bay. In the morning we took the dinghy to Keewaydin and followed a path across the island, and enjoyed our coffee alone on the barrier beach.



Finally after exiting Coon Key pass we motored across the shallows to Panther Key and the beginning of the Faka Union Canal, which would take us to our new Winter home at Port of the Islands Marina.

Kedge

Kedge (kej)
- verb (used with object)
1. To warp or pull (a ship) along by hauling on the cable of an anchor carried out from the ship and dropped.

We had our first true ICW day today. We hit bottom on two different occasions and the second time required the quick dispatch of Chronos and the bow anchor. (Going aground is a popular pass time and topic of conversation on the ICW due to various states of maintenance and rapid shoaling of the channel.)
How did we get into such a situation in the first place you ask? We have been using three navigational references on this trip. First, paper charts - for the ICW in a handy spiral bound reference. Second, the same government charts via a computer program called GPSNavX which plots your location on the chart as you go and provides lots of handy waypoint and route info. Third, an iPhone app called Navionics (which sources the screen shots I often add here). Early in the day as we happily motored through what both electronic charts showed as land, we decided this would be a day to depend on the buoys and our eyes.
As we looked ahead for a place to anchor for the night, protected from the SW and W winds which were expected to gust to 30 as a front passed over we noted a nice creek with charted depths of 15 and 16 feet. We noted that it was just before day marker "23".

The thick yellow line on the chart is our track.

So we turned into the phantom creek and felt our way along with the depth sounder. 6 feet, 4, 3 (we are aground at 2 on the depth sounder)... Then 2.1, then blank. So we turned away from the island thinking that perhaps we had left the channel between the wrong grass islands... Nope. Aground. We were able to back and retraced our route to the ICW proper. Okay. Let's anchor in that 6 ft spot we first saw. No. Promptly ran aground and backing wasn't doing the trick. We already knew the tide was outgoing so time was short. Enter the kedge. Anchor in dinghy. Row toward channel. Drop anchor. Pull boat to anchor. Just that easy. Kairos is designed with a wide shallow keel the full length of the boat, deeper aft. This design allows her to pivot on the deeper aft section as her bow finds deeper water and she can then drive off.

Photo of the offending water between marker "23" and land

What a story, we have been baptized by kedge and can now join the ICW cocktail chat. The best part of the day? It was in Florida!