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.
This past holiday season, my daughter Lauren who was with me on our first blogged trip in the spring of '13 at Islamorada in the Florida Keys made it clear that in addition to all the usual holiday stuff she wanted to do an island adventure with Gertie and Bernie before she returned to the nasty weather in Chicago. Rightly so as it turns out. Lauren lives on the shore of Lake Michigan and it has been reported that record low temperatures there this January exceeded even those of the South Pole. We can blame it on Canada or Global Warming, whichever floats your boat.
Lauren was thirteen when she and her sister Vanessa accompanied me on her first independent Gunkhole adventure which was a 150 mile round trip to the mouth of Catskill Creek NY on the Hudson River in our Catalina 22 sailboat. We "putt-putted" against the strong north wind and the current all the way there with our 8 hp Johnson outboard. In addition to the spectacular scenery, we remember fondly our evening group reading of RIP VAN WINKLE in the town where he woke up 20 years after he went to sleep.
I chose this relatively easy trip just south of Marco and Kice islands which are among the most northerly of the Ten Thousand Islands, because I wanted her to see something special...the infamous Cape Romano Dome Houses. I have made similar trips 3 or 4 times in the past four years in various craft including an Irwin 28 and with and without company. My son Drew accompanied me on a "Fakawi" trip for Fathers' Day in 2012 during which we towed our Pelican double kayak behind the yet to be named Gheenoe who after a motor makeover eventually became Gertie. This turned out to be a good thing as we ended up towing the good for nothing no-name Gheenoe back to Caxambas by using the kayak as the tow vehicle. We also hitched a ride for a few miles behind a Carolina Skiff and then sailed a bit using a parachute beach blanket for a spinnaker. Since then, I've invested in a BoatUSA membership which is kind of like a AAA for boats and they provide towing services. Generally I find that the water, the mudflats and oyster banks and sandbars and inlets (called "Passes" here) are different every time. They don't call them "shifting sands" for nothing and depending on the wind and the tide, I have used different routes. As a result, even though the destination may be the same, the trip itself is always different. As well the passes in and out to the gulf from the various inland rivers and sounds and bays are here today and gone tomorrow. On a kayak trip to Blind Pass (which divides Kice Island from Cape Romano Island), I was able to explore deep inside the center of Kice where even Gertie couldn't go at low tide. Kice Island is something of a phenomenon. But for a complicated environmental court settlement in 1982, it would have been bridged over from Marco Island and its two miles of beaches would have been shoulder to shoulder condo's as a twin development of its big brother Marco to the north. As it is Kice was never platted for development and 4,000 acres are there to share among the osprey, whales, dolphins, manatees, kayakers, shellers, fishermen, commercial jet ski tours and a few odd ball gunkholers. .
