Done With The Old, On To The New…

We had a great night anchored at Cayo Costa’s Pelican Bay.  

The next day we did some more work to put the finishing touches on Selkie. 

We had to reassemble the bimini that protects Selkie’s fly bridge. 

The fly bridge of a boat is the upper steering station, usually exposed and requiring some sun shade, particularly during hot days.

The bimini is the sun shade that protects the crew from exposure.

There was 10 months of salt rust residue on the bimini’s stainless steel frame.   

I had to clean that first. Some elbow grease and Star Clean and it looked like new again. 

Once clean, we put the canvas on the bimini frame.  We then sat down on the fly bridge just to enjoy the moment. 

We then put the motor on the dinghy and launched the dinghy.  

As we were getting ready to go for a walk on the beach, two more dinghies approached us and introduced themselves to us as fellow loopers. 

It’s always fun to see new people and this is the “Class of 2025”  that we’re joining this year. 

We exchanged contact information and will probably see those folks somewhere down in the Florida Keys where we are all headed in a couple of weeks. 

We motored in our dinghy over to Cayo Costa Island. 

It was New Year’s Eve and there are a lot of people out and about.  Many boats were beached along the shore, a lot of families had their sunshades up, and were just enjoying the day. 

We walked around the point looking at the seashells and picked up a couple.

Walking on the beach at Cayo Costa is a pretty unique experience. 

I’ve mentioned before that it’s a state park for the state of Florida, which means that it’s undeveloped and pretty much like the coast of Florida was a century or two ago. 

Seashell picking is pretty good except when it’s a holiday weekend like it was for New Year’s week. 

Still it’s very enjoyable to kind of dig your toes into the sand and just decompress and walk.

That afternoon, the fog came in.

Another Looper boat was coming in later close to dark, and their radar went out in the fog.

Luckily they had been there before, so they followed their old tracks in to Pelican Bay, but they could not find us in the 200 yard visibility until I shined a spotlight in their direction.

Once they saw us, they motored by and anchored close to us.

We hung out in Pelican Bay for three nights, just enjoying ourselves, relaxing and decompressing. 

Like many places that we were to experience from now on, this was our last time at Cayo Costa with Selkie. We savored it as much as we could. 

We did a little more cleaning and polishing of Selkie and then weighed anchor departing for points south. 

On our trip south, we ran into several families of dolphins in Pine Island Sound.

We decided to go to Sanibel Marina, which proved to be an interesting challenge because the channel entrance is just about as wide as Selkie because of the sandbar that sits at the entrance. 

Nevertheless, we made it in, biked around Sanibel, and then had a nice dinner at the restaurant that was right by the marina. 

Libbie and I both love our grouper fish dinners. 

The next day we left Sanibel Marina, after waiting for the tide to be high enough for us, and then went over to San Carlos Bay by Fort Meyers Beach to anchor for the night.

Libbie, of course, took the opportunity to do a little fishing.

The next day we motored down to Naples. 

In Naples that night, we had dinner with some old friends of ours. We saw a high school classmate of mine and his wife last time we were in Naples.  David and I have known each other since eighth grade.  We still like each other.  Old friendships are the best friendships.   We had a really nice night.  

The next day we noticed that the air conditioning unit for our master berth had gone out. 

Luckily it was cool weather so we did not need any AC on the boat. 

I had to do some troubleshooting and diagnostics. As it turns out we have to probably swap out a controller / power board that’s part of the AC unit. 

We’ll get a technician down in the Keys to go ahead and take a look at that when we arrive there. 

We did a little shedding of unused items for Selkie.  It’s always a good feeling when you do some purging of unnecessary stuff.  

We provisioned Selkie, and in the afternoon, some more friends showed up. We had a great afternoon talking about old times.  

After our friends left, we made dinner, and then walked to downtown Naples and got a treat. Gelato in a cone is indeed special. 

We had three excellent days in Naples

We then departed for Everglade city. 

This was going to be new cruising for us as we had not been south of Naples.

It was indeed done with the old and on to the new.

The rest of our journey to the Keys was to be outside any protected channels, and so we really had to be aware of the weather and conditions including shallow water and crab pots to avoid. 

We took off with some anticipation and a little trepidation.

Suffice to say, we survived the voyage to Everglades City just fine, but there were some tense moments.

I’ll write more about that later.