Beautiful Cayo Costa and Cabbage key

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or in this case a wavy line. So rather than go 40+ miles around the point at Fort Myers, we decided to go 30 miles up the Florida Intercoastal to our next stop at Cayo Costa. This is a lovely state park encompassing the island and surrounding waters. We anchored in Pelican Bay. Directions need to be followed closely, or you are likely to end up aground. You may end up aground anyway, but it's all sand, so just go slow, very slow. At Red marker 74, turn toward the entrance and hug the strip of sand to your starboard side. A little more than halfway down the sand bar, begin aiming for the park dock. With our 6 foot draft, we edged up as far up the bay as possible, but ran out of deep water and were forced to anchor unprotected from the east. Still it is a beautiful spot. For $2, you can go ashore and tie your dinghy to the dock. The park rangers will take you out to the beach on scheduled runs, or you can hike the trail. Once there, we hiked the beach around to the north edge of the island and then went inland to return to the park headquarters.

 

Wonderful hike, we saw lots of wildlife, including this rare gopher tortoise.

The sunrise was beautiful. On the third day, we moved our anchorage to an area a few miles away, off the intercoastal near Useppa Island directly across from Cabbage Key. The island has a nice restaurant, with beautiful views and flowering poinciana trees. This is also the home of a great heron called Pretty Boy Floyd. pretty Boy has discovered that he prefers cooked fish, caught by others and he hangs around the restaurant patio begging for scraps, which he carries to the water bucket to wash down his lunch.

There is also a water tower to climb and paths to hike. Our morning sunrise off Useppa was especially pretty.



 Leaving Charlotte Harbor behind, we took the shortcut from the channel opening past  the old docks on Boca Grande. The cut looked easy to follow, but w hadn't counted on the fishing competition getting underway just at the point where we turned into the cut and just at the exact time we approached. There were literally dozens of small fishing boats accompanied by referees in their boats, milling around in all directions. They were very polite and stayed out of the way, but we were in really close quarters there as the water shrinks to 7 feet and a width of a hundred yards or so, shoals on every side.

And so we moved on, motor sailing this time to Bradenton and St. Petersburg via a 2 day stop in Venice to wash clothes, shower on shore, and do some biking through town. The cut at Venice is deep and easy to navigate. We stopped at the Crows Nest Marina, just inside the channel opening. . There is only room for about 4 boats on the face dock and their inner docks are really tight to get into, if you are a sailboat, so reservations are important.