The Skull and Bone of Kice Island

 

 

 

My assistant gunkholer, (daughter Lauren of Islamorada Fish Company fame) came down from Chicago at the beginning of October with some romantic notion that camping out on the beach would be a really cool thing to do for my birthday.  The weather was ideal and I remarked that "if we were ever going to do it, then this was the time to do it".  It crossed my mind too, that this would provide a perfect opportunity to try and find some whale bones from that large pod of pilot whales that beached itself this past winter, as referenced in our previous Cape Romano Dome Houses blog.  I too had a romantic notion that if a significant amount of whale bone was found, one could always take up scrimshaw in retirement, a far more glamorous pursuit for grizzled old salts than, say crochet or crosswords. 

It took some cajoling on her part to convince me that the "insect season" was over as the air temperature was still in the 80's and the high summer humidity lingered.  Additionally, as a newly minted Medicare recipient, I was not particularly fond of the idea of testing this particular federal benefit on the first day of issue with the aching bones and rickety back that was surely to be the outcome of a night spent on the hard ground among the sandspurs. 

Florida among many places has these little biting midges colloquially called No See-ums that are as annoying as heck and the only thing that seems to work on them is repellent that has a significant percentage of DEET in it.  It was my 65th birthday and I had never camped out on the sand of a beach (I have slept in the cabin of a boat) and while it didn't merit a place on my bucket list, I felt that it was something that any Gunkholer worth his or her "salt" ought to do.  So we worked it out.  We planned to sleep at Blind Pass where it enters the Gulf of Mexico, a couple of miles north of the Cape Romano Dome houses, the subject of our previous blog.  It would have been a very easy trip from the Caxambas Pass county boat launch, but a sign there prohibited overnight parking.  A phone call later to someone with local knowledge, caused us to divert to Goodland, at the southeast corner of Marco Island where for an additional fee we were able to park our car and trailer overnight.   This was not my first choice because this route has a lot of exposed open ocean to the south which is not a good place for Gertie to be most times with just six inches of freeboard and never a place for her to be in a southerly blow especially with two adults and a load of camping gear.  Additionally it is far longer than the alternative as you can see from the yellow line on the map above causing us to use more fuel than I had accounted for.  Luckily the easterly wind was modest and our trip out was uneventful and on arrival at the western mouth we were greeted by the smoothest Gulf of Mexico water I had ever seen.  Wind and weather can be quite fickle so we chose not to take the time to unpack and just headed north.  I had forgotten my binoculars but expected that a mass of 10 or 20 whale ribcages would be easy to spot from 30 or 40 yards out in the water.  Turned out I was wrong about that and never did see one skeleton from offshore.   The longer trip from Goodland had consumed all the fuel in the Nissan's small internal tank.  As the motor sputtered to a halt, we approached the shore among standing deadwood and submerged stumps to refill it from the spare fuel can while on the shell beach.  I looked down and there right in front of me was a rib bone from a whale.  Yes, one bone.  Now what are the odds of that?  Having embarked from a last minute choice of an alternate port which was going to require more fuel, we run out of gas right at the spot of a single bone? The feeling was uncanny and I continue to think something else was at work here, as had we embarked from Caxambas Pass our initial run would have been from the north (see the top of the red line on the map) and we would not have run out of gas at all. 

Not only that but Lauren looked up the shore to the north and exclaimed "Whoaa!  Look at that" and there, just a few yards away lay a huge skull of a whale.

We refilled the fuel tank and not seeing any bones in the immediate vicinity decided to head up the coast another mile or so to try and discover some more.  When we got to the north end of the island without finding any, we pulled up on the big beach to regroup and then shot this video on the trip south.  At 2 minutes and 14 seconds it seems a little long in retrospect, but stick with it as the skull discovery is the last 43 seconds of it and besides it is a rare view of Kice Island that most people are never going to see under these ideal conditions.  Kice is a special place with 4,000 acres of mangroves and absolutely no development and exists only as a result of a special deal negotiated with Deltona Corporation (the developers of Marco Island) to be kept forever green in exchange for the right of the developer to make Marco Island forever paved.  During the first part of the video where I shout "WooHoo" we scattered a large school of mullet.  Gunkhole Gertie southbound off Kice Island FL

Assuming my best National Geographic paleontologist's pose so as to trick my grandson into thinking I had actually discovered a dinosaur, Lauren snapped this terrific picture above.  Mission accomplished we continued down to Blind Pass and sought a campsite.  It was a full moon tide cycle which means that the normal tidal amplitudes in flood and ebb are magnified.  That is if a normal tidal differential is 2 feet, then during the full moon it might be three feet or four.  Thus we set up the tent high on the dune line, well above the previous high tide line, though that unfortunately set us well inside the sandspur line.  It was a borrowed tent and neither of us had ever tried to set it up before.  Needless to say that was bit of a challenge and things got a little testy here and there but in the end this is what we ended up with, and yes we did have parts left over, but apparently they were spares or something. 

 

 

 

 

Much of the rest of the afternoon was used in gathering driftwood for the big fire we planned on the beach that night.  As it turned out, we ran way short of food and beverages as I had mistakenly assumed that "light" vodka was a recent brilliant technical innovation when in fact it just meant that there was twice as much water in it than in "heavy" vodka.  We were entertained well into the night by the ghost crabs dancing around the fire.  I have always wondered what kind of crab occupied those holes that seem to crop up out of nowhere in the beach sand.  They appeared mesmerized by the bonfire and scurried back and forth constantly and in the reflected light of the fire and the full moon they lived up to their moniker.

I wish I could say the rest of the trip was uneventful, but of course it wasn't.  When we woke up at dawn after an uncomfortable, painful and fitful "sleep", the no-seeums that had missed us last night because of the huge bonfire we were practically sitting inside of, exacted their revenge.  As well, Gertie was awash with water and shell matter apparently having had a rough night of her own and she sat settled into the mud more than 100 yards from any navigable water.  As we waited for the tide to come back in and broke down our camp, the wind freshened over ten knots and wouldn't you know it decided to swing around from the south, which dear reader you may recall is the only direction that we didn't want it to come from, given our required exposed run back to Goodland, where of course we hadn't wanted to launch from in the first place.  We can shorten this story by saying that Lauren and I walked much of the lee shore of Helen's Key dragging Gertie behind us in three foot breaking waves as we continually shipped more water than I was able to pump out.  We broke the trip up into short relay like crossings, with a planned pump out and respite from island to island to island until the waves from the south were finally blocked by Coon Key to our right.  At one point I made the mistake of telling Lauren that the boat was sinking, when what I had really meant to say was merely that it was full of water.  Apparently this caused some apprehension on her part for which I had to apologize later.  Gheenoe's, like Boston Whaler's don't sink.  They just float, though beneath the surface of the water.  IMHO this is little more than a semantic distinction, much like the one about whether my GPS was waterproof or water resistant.  In either case it doesn't work as intended while in the water.  When we got back to the Goodland boat ramp, soaked, bedraggled and bewildered the nice lady who sold us the overnight parking pass expressed that she was genuinely glad to see us.  The feeling was mutual and so ended another very special Gunkhole Gertie adventure and a memorable birthday bashing during which Lauren and I both found and made our bones.  Until next time, may you too REACH YOUR PERFECT BEACH