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.
