Gertie, the Darryls and Blackbeard's Ghost in Key Largo

Sometimes it just takes a decade or two to put things into perspective.  When making preliminary plans for a gunkhole adventure I often rely on Google Earth by mapping out a route to get an idea of distance primarily for time and fuel consumption calculations.  The retained visual image allows me to form a mental impression of the area.  Later if conditions change, or I lose my chart or GPS (both have happened) the research is reassuring, in the sense that even if most of the islands look alike - that Key at that location should be XYZ Key.  I chose to use the bayside waterfront Hampton Inn at Key Largo as my base, though I would have to launch at the famous Caribbean Club (location for the famous John Huston movie "Key Largo" which starred Humphrey Bogart,  Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall).  These days they have the only boat ramp on the bay side in that general area and they like to exploit that monopoly to the tune of $20.00 for a daily park and launch ticket.  In the narrow Florida Keys which stretch for more than 120 miles and require the crossing of over forty bridges, waterfront properties are designated as either "Bayside" or "Oceanside".  Florida Bay which is a part of the Gulf of Mexico is on the right as you travel south to Key West and the Atlantic Ocean and all of the famous diving reefs, shipwrecks and  lighthouses are on the left.  Where you launch and what kind of vessel you put in matters as it is not always possible to go from one side to the other, except at strategic crossings which are few and far between.  Those accommodating sailboats with tall masts are even fewer and further between.  There is a narrow canal that accommodates boats no more than 14 feet high  called "Adam's Cut" in Key Largo, which takes one into Largo Sound at John Pennekamp State Park from where one can get reasonably priced excursion boats out onto the various reefs.  On a previous dive/snorkel/fish trip about two years ago my son Drew and I took our double Pelican kayak through "The Cut" in a racing tide to no particular purpose other than to see what was on the other side, which as you may recall is the essence of gunkholing.  More about THE CUT

My destination this time around was the Nest Keys in the southeast quadrant of Everglades National Park.  For Gertie this would be a piece of cake at about a 20 mile round trip.  While I had no intention of kayaking all the way there and back, I did want to paddle the surrounding water.  The harness that was rigged up to Gertie's stern cleats had my little blue Mainstream Jazz riding high and dry behind.  Upper Nest Key has one of the few island beaches in Everglades National Park and it is a designated overnight camping area (though one has to reserve a site and pay a fee).  As the REACH YOUR BEACH guy I had to see it just because it was there.  The island is also home to some very unusual and incongruous architecture that rises ten feet above sea level that I had to see for myself.  My routing had Gertie passing very close to a small, shallow body of water completely surrounded by land.  It looks like an atoll and is named Little Buttonwood Sound.  On the map below it is just under Boggy Key.  It seemed that I had heard something about Little Buttonwood Sound before; it looked awfully familiar and for some reason made me think that I had been there before and thereby hangs this tale.

THE INCONGRUOUS ARCHITECTURE OF THE NEST KEYS

 

In February of 1988, six city slickers from New York, Chicago, Toronto, New Orleans and Milwaukee cast off into the wilderness, north and east of Islamorada on a rented houseboat named the "Roger B".  The motley crew comprised Bill Rickman, Kevin McCaffrey, Joe Friedman, Chris Keen, David Schwartz and me.  We were all booksellers and had finished a series of meetings in Miami for the ABA (American Booksellers Association) and most of us were in no rush to return to winter weather.  At the end of the voyage everyone received a souvenir paper chart of the route and the location of the three overnight stops along with a couple of photographs.  When Little Buttonwood Sound tickled my memory I looked around the house and garage to no avail for that souvenir chart of the "Voyage of the Roger B".  I emailed Kevin and within a few days after finding the chart in his storage locker he confirmed that Little Buttonwood Sound was indeed where we had spent our second night on the "Roger B".  From October 1982 until May 1990 the funniest situation comedy on television was simply called "NEWHART" and the lead character was an owner of a small Vermont Inn played by Bob Newhart.  A stand-up comic whose signature act was one sided telephone conversations, he had a long successful run playing a psychiatrist in a previous series a decade earlier.   Most regular characters on the new show such as Tom Poston (the caretaker in the video) were hilarious and among them were three brothers named Larry, Darryl and Darryl.  To appreciate this check out the link.  The Larry, Darryl and Darryl Brothers.  The brothers were somewhat simple to put it mildly and played beautifully to Newhart's signature dead pan style which twenty years before had been introduced by another terrific comedian - Bill Cosby.  "Noah...how long can you tread water?". 

 

After a series of mishaps, misadventures and plain stupid tricks it became clear to the members of the motley crew of the "Roger B" that they had more in common with the Darryls than with Jacques Cousteau and so that is what we called each other for the duration of the voyage and as it turned out for the duration of our lives.  To each other, each of us is his brother Darryl even to this day.  A handful of other Darryl adventures followed this including a pedestrian hike across the Mexican border at Yuma AZ where nocturnal helicopters searching for soggy spined swimmers in the Alamo canal reminded us of the movie Apocalypse Now as Schwartz barbecued his signature rack of rosemary lamb oblivious to the chaos around him.   In addition there was a hike along the ridge of Catalina Island above Avalon and a sail boat charter in the San Juan Islands with a bar run to Friday Harbor. 

 

We loaded up with beer, booze, groceries and cigarettes in Islamorada.  A much greater percentage of people smoked in those days (myself included) and Chris who was from Toronto had Export A's which were right up there in intensity and strength with the Gitanes and Gauloises of France.  Joe Friedman and I soon thereafter quite smoking with the help of a New York psychologist who used hypnotic therapy.  I mention the cigarette pack which was bright, forest green because none of us had navigation instruments and over the next few days the straight edge of the hard pack of Canadian cigarettes became our parallel rule to connect marks on the chart which we gleaned from the red and green navigation markers that mysteriously appeared from time to time. And so was born a new sailor as Kevin wielded the cigarette pack like a surgical instrument and plotted courses that could have taken us to Cartagena if we had let him have his way.  These days Kevin is an award winning documentary filmmaker ... Everything you didn't know you wanted to know about Cajun Food.  He lives 13 1/2 feet below the levee of Lake Pontchartrain and as a result must be the only person in the world to race his J24 past his own rooftop.  Chris drove the boat as he had some experience with power boats on Canadian lakes.  I was strictly a sailboat guy and any engine over 8 horsepower was likely to induce vertigo and blood rushing to my brain.  I was put in charge of music and played the recently released album by Paul Simon called "Graceland" over and over again at loud volume and I still associate "The Boy in the Bubble" with green, milky water, wind, waves, dolphins and Darryls.

 

 

We didn't know it then, but we were zigging and zagging and burning cheap gas to no end in and around the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) that connects Miami to Key West on the "Bayside".   Especially after my recent trip I have no idea how we ever found where we were going, let alone how we found our way back.  In retrospect, since we weren't really going anywhere, it didn't matter much and we got there (which really was no where), which is entirely consistent with the Darryls' theme of the voyage of the "Roger B".   

"It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road"

It is a pleasure to report that on the morning of Tuesday November 19th, 2013, just shy of 26 years later, the water had exactly the same milky green complexion.  As with most sailing yarns, this one could go on and on and I need to cut to the quick.  Toward sunset of the second day out, we entered the calm bay of Little Buttonwood Sound seeking an anchorage for the night,  A very large power yacht was leaving the Bay through the narrow cut at the same time and the Captain shouted across that he had been unable to find a good holding ground for his anchor and thus he was not going to stay the night.  The Darryl's of course had no idea what he meant and confidently thought that was his problem.  When we threw the anchor off the bow, it disappeared in the ground underwater.  BTW, the water wasn't much more than two or three feet deep throughout the sound and one had a clear view to the bottom.  With the anchor out of sight, we knew we were good and proceeded to debate all the big issues of the day, drink some whiskey and beer, play poker and retired to our respective bunks.

When I awoke I knew instinctively that something was wrong.  The tree branches coming in through the windows were an indication as well.  Apparently, we had been blown ashore during the night.  During our orientation for the houseboat rental, the manager (and much of the literature) made it clear that any ingestion of mud into the boat motor would result in fatal damage for which the renters' (read Darryls) would be held liable.  So one's first instinct which was to gun the sucker out of the mangroves was off the table.  I quietly slipped over the stern deck into the water with the hope that I could pull the shallow drafted vessel back out to deeper water before the others awoke and pretend like nothing had happened.  Unfortunately I promptly sunk to my armpits in the white muck.  Luckily I had hold of a line or I might have been like one of those guys going down the pit in those old Tarzan movies.  Always in the back of my mind .

After pulling myself back up on to the deck of the boat and having a discussion with the crew as to our least expensive options we decided to all get in the water and pull the "Roger B" out of the mangroves.  Though six of us hauling a line over our shoulders like Volga boatmen ought to have resulted in some advantage none of us could get a purchase in the mud and we were not able to move the boat even an inch.  Back aboard, Schwartz opined on the nature of leadership and how any single person could lead five other normally smart people into mud up to their armpits to risk their lives for a rented houseboat.  One of my favorite movies of all time is Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog in which the protagonist played by Klaus Kinski carries out an audacious scheme to manually haul a steamship across a mountain to link up to an Amazon tributary that flowed to a different watershed in the opposite direction.

Keewaydin Island between Naples and Marco Island Florida

As the picture clearly shows, the most exciting thing about this island is that it is so boring.  Hardly anyone lives here and except for holiday week-ends and one big party week-end at the end of May at the far southern extremity relatively few people come here.  While there are 50 platted private lots on the 8 mile long island, (six of them are owned by members of one family) many of them have never been developed and those few that have been are for the most part unobtrusive.  The most southerly of the private homes on 5 acres was recently listed at $2.8 million and can be seen on YouTube.  A number of lots were purchased by various conservation agencies and much of the island falls within the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Reserve which controls development rights over 110,000 acres in this general area.  

Known earlier as Key Island, the name was changed to reference the Longfellow poem “Song of Hiawatha” by the operators of a series of “Outward Bound” type sleep-away camps called Keewaydin Camps.  These camps, fourteen in all at the zenith were located in Vermont, Maine and Ontario among other places.  One of them, founded in 1893 appears still to be operating in northern Ontario at Lake Temagami.  As I was researching their website I was surprised to find that it is located  just 100 miles by bush plane from where I earned my Boy Scout canoeist merit badge in Algonquin Park about 50 years ago.  That episode evokes a fond but painful memory in that I had to carry a canoe that weighed much more than me for a 100 yard portage connecting Smoke Lake to Grape Lake without putting it down.  I not only whittled my own paddle from a piece of redwood, but with the rest of the troop we shaped the canoe from fiberglass matte and resin, on a group owned mould.  With the canoe on my aching shoulders it soon became apparent that we had used way too much fiberglass and ought to have spent another day sanding it away. When the Keewaydin Camp on Key Island closed as a result of financial difficulties traced back to the Camp Director and his spouse’s misallocation of funds, the facility was converted to a lodge.  It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, closed in 1999 and is now privately owned. 

Despite its apparent seclusion, depending on wind and tides, this island is readily accessed from various embarkation points in the Naples area.  If you or a friend has a boat with a motor, you can be there in minutes.  By paddle it is generally less than a one hour trip with a favorable tide to three different landing areas.   From the east you can use the free Shell Island launch and follow the Hall Bay navigation markers west to the intersection of the Intracoastal, cross over it and at Green marker 28A, enter the channel between Little Marco Island and Gannon Island.  The white beach straight ahead is your destination, though it is the smaller beach on the east or channel side of Keewaydin and not the mind bogglingly huge beach on the west side that everyone raves about.  You can beach your craft here and walk across the marked trail a few yards to get to the big beach.  On this stretch you were travelling between Little Marco Island on your right and Cannon Island on the left.  After Little Marco ends in a long mudflat, if you want to cruise down the left side before you cross the channel to the big island, there is a long narrow beach interrupted by large Casuarina root balls that is one of the prettiest sights around.  There are a lot of variable currents in this area known locally as Hurricane Pass and Cannon Island turns itself into Sea Oat Island in this general area, which is constantly changing.  The small bays bordered by the stumps face west to Keewaydin and I have spent quite a few glorious hours on this little stretch watching the big boys with their motorized toys across the channel.  You can also access this area from the south by renting kayaks at the Isle of Capri or renting a motorboat or pontoon boat from the Marco River Marina.  If you feel more comfortable with a commercial day trip, there are plenty of those around including the big catamaran at Naples City Dock called “Sweet Liberty” that offers shelling cruises for a very reasonable price. 

Though it is the shortest route, I don’t recommend coming to Keewaydin Island’s west side through Gordon Pass when embarking from the north but it is very easy to do when conditions are favorable.   If you are car topping, you can park at the fore-mentioned 33rd Ave. South cul de sac and paddle south a little more than a mile and you will be there.  However, this generally works only when there is no wind or the forecast is for very slight winds.  Wind speeds of over 10 knots, from any direction other than east will usually kick up two or three foot waves and crossing Gordon Pass between and among very large boat wakes, tidal currents and incoming surf make for a tricky crossing that is not for the faint of heart.  When approaching from the north, it is preferable to launch from Bayview Park’s boat ramp where Keewaydin is a clearly visible hop and a skip to the west.  The kicker though is that you still have to find a good public landing spot on the island that is not choked with impenetrable red mangroves.  If you coast with an outgoing tide to the Intracoastal markers and turn left (south) then Keewaydin will be on your right.  About 2,000 yards into this segment you’ll enter Dollar Bay.  From Marker 68, head WSW and there will be an entrance to a series of mangrove channels, that will take you to either of two different landing sites, about a mile from the north end of the island.  If you wish you can go further south to Green Marker 67 and then head southwest to the opening.

The bays that you enter out of the mangrove channel literally back up to the big beach.  The mangrove channels are not easy to navigate without a guide the first time and while technically you can’t get lost in here as there is only one way in and out, there are a lot of dead-ends and you feel like you could, especially if you can’t discern the opening for the way out.  Don’t try this one on your own, until you get a chance to study the area and make a few other practice runs.  If you have a GPS with a chart plotter you can get in and out of here quite readily with just three or four waypoints at the mouth, the destination and a couple of tight turn channels in between.  I also recommend that anyone attempting this trips study the area on Google Maps before embarking and bring a paper chart in case your GPS runs out of battery power.  In a place where there are hundreds of thousands of mangroves it seems odd to use a red mangrove tree as a marker but from the pic below you can  see that this particular one is very distinctive indeed.  When you see it, you will have arrived at the beach cross-over.

Another route that will give you access to the center of the island which is its most remote point, is to look for Red Marker 46 on the Intracoastal.  This part of the beach is so relatively isolated, that it is recommended as a camping site by the Naples Kayak Company and from time to time you may encounter some fellow free spirits here.  If you are coming from either the north or south by motorized craft, just follow the numbers.  For my purposes, it is too long and too busy to follow the channel to this mark from either end.  I recommend an outgoing tide from the Shell Island launch site.  Rookery Bay is only a couple of miles long so a two knot favorable tidal current coupled with a few hundred well placed paddle strokes in a northwesterly direction will suffice to get you there in less than a hour.  The bay is very shallow with a mean water depth of less than three feet, so there is very little boat traffic.  A pod of four dolphins once cavorted with me in here for a delightful half hour.    At the north end of the bay, the channel takes you out to the Intracoastal again.  Green Marker 47 is visible first and when you turn the corner in a southerly direction, you’ll see the Red Marker 46.  Opposite it, there is a sandy landing area that you can use to beach your boat.  The path to the big beach is about 30 yards long and depending on how long you are planning to stay, you might wish to carry your kayak across so your gear is not out of sight as you are wandering up and down the main beach.  You have roughly 4 miles of beach in both directions before it ends so this is likely as close as most of us are even going to get to gazing at a long stretch of uninterrupted white beach sand as far as we can see in either direction. 

Sea Turtle Tracks

 

Gratitude for the Attitude of the Archdruid 42 years later

Our search for the "perfect beach" continues somewhat abated by weather, mosquitos and no-see-ums.  As is pointed out in the first of my REACH BEACH books, the perfect beach, like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.  GUIDE TO COLLIER COUNTY BEACHES.  A beach can be perfect at any time on any day or only at that time on that day.  It depends on numerous factors or just one factor.  The beach may be perfect as a result of the angle of the sun, the layers of the clouds, the varying colorful hues of the water, the presence of a dolphin or a manatee though generally things that are out of your control.  However, the one factor in your control is that you brought yourself and/or your friend or your spouse or companion here on this day, at this time, in this light, in this weather.  If things work out...you could be a hero.  If the sky's open up and thunder and lightning crack... then you could be the goat, though if your companion has an open mind, you might get another chance, assuming of course, that no-one dies.  On this particular day given the weather, the mosquitos, the no-see-ums, the traffic on I-95 and the fact that I had swapped Gertie for Suzy as a travelling companion almost caused me to spend the day in Pat Croce's Pirate Museum in Saint Augustine.  But I'm glad we persevered in our quest to find the perfect beach and in so doing provided some new blogger fodder and I got to visit the Pirate Museum the next day anyway after which I found a very nice copy of the 1979 Franklin Mint edition of Robinson Crusoe for a $1.00 at a commercial flea market. 

Circumstances caused me to leave Gertie at home about a seven hour drive southwest of here and take a 45 minute commercial ferry boat ride on the St, Mary's River to Cumberland Island National Seashore. Susan, my wife of 41 years and I were vacationing in Saint Augustine FL and we have her car which has no trailer hitch but does have air conditioning.  My trusty but ancient Toytota 4-Runner has a trailer hitch but no air conditioning.  As well, the sun-roof no longer opens unless it is raining and then it won't close.  It is late July in Florida with daily temperatures in the  90's and humidity that averages somewhere between 60% and 101%. I have cumulatively drained 42 inches of rainwater off the top of my pool since the beginning of June.  Life is full of difficult choices.  I opted for the A/C thus causing Gertie to languish forlornly in the damp heat. 

You should also know that my wife is definitely not an outdoor person  She is averse to just about everything that the outdoors offers including sunshine, rain, bugs, no-see-ums, tics, snakes, sharks, rays, water, wind, heat, humidity, sweat....well you get the picture.  When I was a Boy Scout I opted for wilderness camping and earned my canoeist merit badge at the age of 12.  When she was a Girl Scout leader, she led them to a sleep-over in a local Westchester county mall.   So I have to say that Sue demonstrated some rare "gamer" attitude when she agreed to accompany me on this day trip, though in the end she made it clear that the best part was the rocking chair on the Ranger Station porch; that she had only been slightly nauseous from the diesel fumes of the boat's engine on the way over and BTW she wouldn't camp on this island in a million years.  Despite the deprivations, the trip was not a wash-out as far as she was concerned as she discovered that John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were married on this island in 1996 and that definitely made the whole trip worth doing.  This is how Cumberland Island will be forever defined in her mind. 

The mid-point of the St,. Mary's River serves as the Florida/Georgia border and we spent most of the day on the Georgia side.  While the entrance fee to the National Park may be the best $4.00 you ever spent, the ferry ride itself is an additional $20 a person.  Gertie would have done it for a lot less, but she is not here.  Thousands of gunkholing opportunities do abound here in this massive saltwater marsh and should Gertie (or a larger successor) and I ever find our way this far north again, we're sure to take a stab at it.  I think the best way to see this island is to anchor a cruising sailboat or power yacht in the west channel for a week or two and then circumnavigate daily by dinghy or kayak returning to the mother-ship each evening for daiquiris or margaritas.

I was first made aware of the Cumberland Island National Seashore in a book by John McPhee entitled ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ARCHDRUID. While I had been a McPhee fan for decades I wasn't aware of this particular title published in 1971 until I moved to Naples in the early 2000's and found a copy in a Friends of the Library sale for 50 cents.  The first of his books that I read was entitled THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY because it was in my sample case when I represented his publisher,  Farrar Straus and Giroux as a book traveler in Canada in the early 1970's.  It was free and I wanted to know what I was selling.  I liked GIVING GOOD WEIGHT (about New York's Union Square Farmers' Market) and my favorite was LOOKING FOR A SHIP (about travelling the world's oceans on a tramp steamer).  I liked COMING INTO THE COUNTRY (about Alaska)  and the PINE BARRENS (about New Jersey) as well.  It wasn't until today though that  I truly understood the brilliance of the selection of the words that make up the title.  Druids, of course were (or still are) tree worshippers.  An Archdruid would be the head honcho tree worshipper responsible for this grove of trees in the same way that an Archbishop is responsible for the well being of his diocese.   I always understood that David Brower (the founder of the Sierra Club and the subject of the title) was a tree hugger (as they used to be called pejoratively in the early days of the environmental movement) but after this visit I am so very glad that someone was prepared to do that so that any of us can have a day like this.  All the live oaks on Cumberland Island are the parishioners of his diocese and he saved them from a developer's bull dozers.  Until I saw the trees today, I could not appreciate the scope of the Arch in the Druid.  So here I am looking for a beach (I generally don't do woods) and I find a "magic forest".  But its not just ten trees or a handful of big 200 year old live oaks, or a single one as is the "Senator" in Saint Augustine but 20,000 acres of live oaks most of which are hundreds of years old and dripping with draped Spanish moss.  The entire island is about 36,000 acres, 17 miles long and the rest of the area is salt marsh, tidal flats and one heck of a HUGE beach.  If you want to read more about John McPhee, follow this link.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee.  Here are a few of the " tree shots". 

Our own physical limitations as well as the ferry schedule determined how much ground we could cover but when retracing our steps on Google earth using the "path" measuring tool the hike from Sea Camp Dock, to Dungeness Dock, to the ruins, the cemetery, the south beach cross-over and up the beach to Sea Camp turned out to be five miles with about a mile of that on the beach itself.  The sand dune cross-overs, the Dungeness ruins, the expansiveness of the beach were all magnificent.  The south dune cross-over trail had all the makings of crossing the Gobi Desert with sand surface temperatures likely about 110 degrees.  All of it together made for a wonderful day of exploration, by the end of which I too was very happy to be rocking on the porch in the shade discussing JFK Jr. and Carolyn's wedding.  It is certainly a quirk of fate is it not that two people who so loved islands would get married on one (Cumberland)  and tragically and prematurely die together in a small plane trying to get to another (Martha's Vineyard) less than a thousand air miles apart. 

I think the Park Service is missing a bet by not serving up "Happy Hour" cocktails like Pittypat's Porch does up in Atlanta on cracker rocking chairs very similar to these.  Everyone on this porch was very happy and because no-one dared to miss the last ferry of the day, we all had an extra hour to rock. We could have really rocked to a couple of mint juleps or sazeracs though. 

http://cumberlandisland.com/

Gunkhole Gertie goes to Panther Key

For some time I've intended to try out the Port of the Islands boat ramp which is owned by the Collier County Parks Department.  They purchased it for millions of dollars back when the Florida real estate boom was on and I had always wondered why.  The Parks Department has been renovating Bayview Park for most of the winter (they finished on time on June 5th).  This is my preferred launch site for gunkholing in and around Dollar Bay and Keewaydin Island and for getting out on the water quickly.  It is just minutes from downtown Naples and you can be completely isolated in mangroves in just a few minutes.

On this Memorial Day week-end Saturday I hooked "Gertie the Gheenoe"' to my 4-Runner and took the 22 mile trip to the launch ramp.  The $75 annual Collier County boat launch sticker is good here, even if it feels like you are in another county.  The advantage of this particular embarkation point is that it puts you significantly further

into the 35,000 acre Ten Thousand Island National Wildlife Refuge once you get out of the approaches.  The disadvantage is that the approach is a seemingly long (3.0 nautical miles) no wake zone to get out of the Faka Union Canal.  What should take a couple of minutes takes either a half hour or an hour (depending on one's definition of a wake).  One does this ridiculous speed in deference to the manatees and sea turtles and in order not to get a ticket.  I saw no manatees but did see a loggerhead sea turtle floating on the surface on my return leg.  It would definitely have been vulnerable to a boat prop injury in a high speed zone.  Not sure I would take this approach again because of that but it is worth noting that the next ramp south is in Everglades National Park and it would require a separate launch fee.  The closest ramp in Collier County is a relatively new one as well at Goodland (according to some residents....a drinking village with a fishing problem).  Goodland is a relatively remote outpost at the south east corner of Marco Island.  This puts you in the water in the northern reaches of the 10,000 islands but it is still only seven nautical miles to Panther Key though you can run these seven miles at full speed.  I've used this approach past the Coon Key light on two sailing embarkations a couple of years apart to Little Shark River and Vaca Key (Boot Key Harbor).  One trip was in an Irwin 28 and the other was in a Watkins 31 after having motored down the Marco River from the Marco Island Yacht Club.   It is worth noting that the Goodland route is in exposed water to the west and south and the Faka Union Canal route was entirely in sheltered water this day in a modest easterly wind.  Depending on the direction and velocity of the wind, this might factor into your decision making.  I've also used Goodland to approach Blind Pass and Kice Island from the east but took a drubbing on the way back when the wind shifted from the south.  Many of you may be familiar with the little ditty "sailing, sailing over the ocean blue..." well that day mine was "bailing, bailing over the ocean green, white and effin frothy". 

The track from the end of the Faka Union Canal out to Panther Key is well marked with navigation markers though there was frequent shoaling and Gertie had to "eat more dirt" than I was comfortable with even when I thought I was well within the marks.  Luckily it is all muck down there and no rock so no permanent damage was done despite the wailing and screaming of her little Nissan in protest at being made to eat more dirt than a little engine should.

 

The jpeg above illustrates the length of the Panther Key beach looking east.  At the eastern end of this beach  there was a fast in-bound tide that led one to a seemingly tranquil lagoon that I would have liked to explore further but I didn't have my kayak with me this day.  I considered letting the tide take me for an inbound float but thought better of it and sure enough while I was contemplating a huge mother of a sting ray brushed my ankle.  I have done the dive with the rays excursion over in Grand Cayman's North Sound but felt more or less fully protected in mask, fins and a wet-suit.  Under the circumstances, i.e. nearly naked with 95% skin exposed,  I chose not to swim with the sharks (they are related you know).  Further up closer to Gertie there were a few horseshoe crabs engaging in behavior that I will call cavorting though they could have been making baby horseshoes but how would I know.  There were thousands of so-called "love bugs" on the beach and in general I would say their contortions while cavorting  were similar to those of the crabs.  I like the alliteration so let's just go with the fact that I saw a number of "contorting cavorting crabs". 

 

 

So what's a gunkholer?

A gunkholer is a person who practices gunkholing.  You may not be familiar with the term.  A lot of people aren't.  Some dictionaries do not provide a definition of the term but luckily for us we live in the WIKI age and they have a great explanation which suits my purposes.  One doesn't wish to cross the line into plagiarism on one's first post so I won't post their definition here.  You can just skip over there, check it out, determine for yourself if this is something that might appeal to the inner primitive in you and then skip on back over here.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunkholing. Rest assured that I am qualified to write about gunkholing because recently my daughter Lauren and I visited a place in the south eastern extremities of Everglades National Park where 28 years ago I naively and foolishly stepped off the rented houseboat and sunk in the gunk to my armpits.  Nowadays in my "olden" years I try to keep the gunk below the knees or avoid it all together by hovering above it in a very shallow draft vessel of some sort.  Not too long ago in the Clam Pass Park estuary just west of  Marker 25 I found myself literally up the creek without a paddle.  I was walking a grid pattern while knee deep in mangrove muck and dragging my feet hoping to hook my metal kayak paddle with a foot.  I had dropped the paddle overboard and it hadn't resurfaced.  No-one had ever claimed that it floated, but I had mistakenly assumed that it would.  Who would make a paddle that doesn't float?  After a scary half hour imagining all the different ways I was going to trudge, swim or waddle through the muck to get home without a paddle, I kicked it and recovered it.  One of the reasons I was in this isolated spot is that on the Clam Pass Canoe and Kayak Trail in Pelican Bay in north Naples Florida, there is a secret mangrove tunnel that leads to a cross-over to a magnficent stretch of beach with no buildings on it and at low tide you do have to negotiate the gunk to get there. 

Actually as evidenced in the pic below I much prefer sandy landings, which culminated in my first travel guide published by KDP COLLIER BEACH GUIDE

Blogger and Author with "Gunkhole Gertie"

I walked all of the 35 miles of beaches here to get the right "vibe" for REACH YOUR PERFECT BEACH IN AND AROUND NAPLES FLORIDA.   I intend to employ the same level of diligence in exploring the islands.  I quite enjoy gunkholing.  Unknowingly I had been doing it for years, always looking for a beach or a small cove or a harbor from Prince Edward Island in Canada's far east to the San Juan Islands in Washington State's far west, that had neither buildings nor people on it.  A lot of retirees or semi-retirees golf, sail or play tennis.  I have done all of those things and have concluded that gunkholing (until it is discovered and becomes the next big Baby Boomer thing) is the cheapest, biggest, bang for the buck.  I can go all day on a gallon or two of gas (or none if I choose to paddle) and find an island upon which I can be "King for a Day".  If I choose to rent the island, I inevitably offer nothing in exchange and if there is another person anywhere in sight, I will offer an effective voodoo incantation courtesy of my Haitian co-workers at Clam Pass Park that is surprisingly effective in getting them to leave.  Some day soon, I am going to claim an island like those old Spaniards did and see what happens.  It is not clear from the picture above that in this instance we are no where near a beach.  I am standing in the middle of Florida Bay a couple of miles north of Islamorada at approximately N24 58.33 and W80 39.58.  I say approximately as it was not long after Lauren took this picture that in an attempt to remove some specie of stinging insect from this overloaded and very small 13 foot craft (recently dubbed Gunkhole Gertie by Kevin McCaffrey my documentary filmmaker friend from New Orleans) I stupidly knocked my handheld Garmin GPS over the side.  I had intended to murder or maim the miserable critter but instead caught the external antenna of the GPS with a panicked side swipe of my arm. The manufacturer claims that it floats and it does.  Ah, truth in advertising at last.  We circled and were able to pick it up but soon the real truth emerged.  It is apparently water resistant but not waterproof.  You can splash it and still use it but you can't float it and expect to use it.  You've gotta love this very creative use of the English language started by "Mad Men" back in the day, don't you?  Well so much for gunkholing on the cheap but it is worth noting that a new one at West Marine with all of the coastal waterways of the entire country still costs less than a new driver or a couple of rounds of golf.  So, Saturday I sold my stacker kayak trailer and got enough from the proceeds to buy a new Garmin 78CS and even got change. They say it floats!  With a new GPS, Gunkhole Gertie will be unstoppable.  They say there are 10,000 islands down here.  Stay tuned.  Only 9.994 to go.

Daughter Lauren "Lost in the Everglades".

No longer "Lost in the Everglades".  Just a few hours later while waiting for Mr. Right  at the Islamorada Fish Company in the Florida Keys.