Thursday, February 21, 2013 – Pelican Bay:

            We spent a quiet, peaceful night in this lovely anchorage off Cayo Costa Island.  The Waterway Guide tells you that Spanish fisherman from Havana gave the island its name meaning “Coastal Key.”  We woke up, however, to another “pea soup” morning.  I decided to fix a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs, English muffins and tomatoes while we waited to see what the weather would do.  Happily, soon after, though, the sun burned off the fog, and we were ready to start exploring Cayo Costa. 

Anchored in Pelican Bay

            We picked up our friends in our dinghy and headed over to the island and tied the dinghy up at the public dock where the Cayo Costa State Park Headquarters is located.  This island is six miles long, and mostly uninhabited except for campers and some feral pigs, which, thankfully, we didn’t see any of! From there, we walked about a mile along a white, sandy trail that winds past cabins and campgrounds until it opens up to a beautiful beach on the gulf.  We walked along the beach for a long way, looking through the gazillions of shells for sand dollars and wading in the water.  Finally, it was time to turn around and head back to the dinghy and our boats for lunch and to get ready for the afternoon’s adventures!

Walking along the beach at Cayo Costa

The trail on Cayo Costa heading out to the beach

            Our friends had told us about a beautiful “water trail” that winds its way through a narrow maze of overhanging mangroves and other strange flora and fauna.  Their story piqued our interest, and we were excited about exploring this new place.  I think the locals call it “The Tunnel of Love,” but its real name is Murdock Bayou.  Bonnie and Phil had taken this little side trip a few years ago, and Bonnie said she was glad she had done it, but wasn’t sure she wanted to do it again! She related stories of the water being so shallow that they almost had to get out and pull the dinghy along, and Phil told us he was concerned about going back into the stream because of all the dead logs lying on the bottom that would just love to snag the bottom of your dinghy and leave you stranded for the alligators!  Well, after a few glasses of wine to boost our bravery quotient last night, we were ready to go!  At Cayo Costa this morning, we talked with a park ranger who told us that you actually had to lie down to get under some of the overhanging mangroves!  Some of our bravado started to ebb, but we didn’t let any of this stop our plans for this adventure.

            When I was thinking of this trip last night, I thoughtfully considered all the items we should take with us such as sun screen, hat, cell phones, hand held radio, hand held GPS, light jacket, bottled water, and my sister-in-law gave me this nifty little leatherman like tool (in pink!) that I knew we shouldn’t be without.  We were each going to follow each other over in our own respective dinghies, and then assess the lay of the land when we got there, and probably just take our dinghy up the stream because we have a hard bottom on our dinghy that would hopefully take sliding over dead logs in its stride without deflating.   So when Phil and Bonnie motored over to our boat, we hopped in our dinghy all excited to be heading over to Murdock Bayou without giving a single, second thought as to putting any of the “survival” items in our dinghy.  Nope!  I didn’t even wear a hat.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!   Well, I did have the cell phone, and Bob did bring the hand held GPS, and he always wears a hat no matter what.

            Well, anyway, off we go – and it’s a long dinghy ride over some big open water to get to Murdock Bayou.  It takes us about 45 minutes to get into the little bayou where you enter the “Tunnel of Love.”  Why, and how anybody ever came up with that name is beyond me – it seems to me that it should have been called “alligator” alley or maybe “spine-tingling stream.”

            Now before I go any farther, I would just like to jot down a few “personal” observations about dinghies.  First off, as I just mentioned, it was a long dinghy ride, and you have to depend on your little outboard engine to perform reliably.  Now when everyone thought that using ethanol was a really good idea, we, of course, started using it in our outboard engine.  Bad idea!  After having the engine die on us several times in the past, and having to row back to the boat from some far away creek we had been exploring, or party on another boat, we spent well over a hundred dollars getting the thing de-gummed and properly working again.  Consequently, we went on a major hunt for non-ethanol gas to use for the dinghy engine, which we found, but it wasn’t right next door!  (I know some people who probably have degrees in rocket fuels, can make this stuff work in their engines, but we weren’t one of them).  So, I had some concerns as to whether our little engine would get us the approximately 30 miles (no…no…) I mean three miles without conking out.  The other observation is that dinghies are made of rubber (yeah, yeah, I know - it’s some kind of really strong rubber – but it’s rubber)!  One good chomp from an alligator, and it would deflate in a heartbeat, and we would be alligator fodder!  I don’t care if the bottom of the dinghy is hard!  So I worried about these things, but all turned out well, the dinghy engine performed perfectly, and we didn’t get eaten by alligators – but - one did follow us – more on that next!

            So we finally arrived at the entrance to the bayou, and on another note some of the water we went through to get there was so shallow you could clearly see the bottom and all the grasses growing there, and we had to be careful not to get the engine propeller snagged on some of this stuff.  So we are motoring up alongside Bonnie and Phil to have our first discussion about entering this stream, and I look over to our left and see this thing floating calmly in the water, and I alert everyone to the fact that there is an alligator right there! Bob tells me at the time it is not an alligator, but floating debris, and I tell him, “Hey! I know an alligator when I see one!”  And sure enough, as we each enter this little “crick”, the alligator (or floating debris as Bob likes to call it) starts to follow us.  I don’t know whether to be concerned or not, but I kept an eye on it, and it finally disappeared.  That was a little unsettling, but I decided not to worry about it.

Paddling into Murdock Bayou

Murdock Bayou

            So in we go.  We have decided to go in only so far, and then Phil and Bonnie would tie up their dinghy, and we would all go the rest of the way in ours.  Phil was a little concerned about leaving the dinghy in the middle of the streambed, but hey, who on earth would come in here besides us?!  It is full of mangroves, and dead and dying debris, and you do have to be very careful about meandering through this stuff.  Someone, probably the park ranger, has been in here recently, and trimmed and pruned the overhanging branches, so we didn’t have to lie down in the dinghy to get under them.  It really looks prehistoric, and your imagination could run wild.  I had decided early on that if I heard one plunk of a banjo, I was out of there as fast as I could go – alligators or not.  But, seriously, it is unusual and beautiful – nature at its most primitive.  It’s dark, and humid, then the sun streams through a break in the mangroves and sparkles off the water.  The water is crystal clear, and you can see everything on the bottom.  But the bottom is littered with nature’s detritus. This little streambed (or whatever you want to call it) finally empties out into a nice little lake, and we paddled over to an area where we could tie up the dinghy and walk out to the beach.  I marveled at nature’s diversity when I thought of the primitively quiet area we had just been through and how different it was from the huge expanse of the gulf and the shore line we were now walking – from the decaying branches and logs on the bottom of the bayou area and the tiny shells left by dying shell fish washed up on the beach by forces we will never tame.

Continuing up Murdock Bayou

Our friends on the beach before heading back

            When it was time to leave, we headed back to the dinghy, climbed in and started our trek home.  Well, the first thing we saw was a fisherman in his kayak, who had just come out of the bayou area and was proceeding to flyfish in the little lake!  We apologized for leaving a dinghy in his way, but he indicated it had been no problem.  Who would ever have thought anyone would come in here besides us!  Then after we retrieved our friend’s dinghy, and we got out of Murdock’s Bayou, there was a group of people in a dinghy starting to head in.  Who knew there was going to be a party!  We warned them about the alligator, and went on our merry way – extremely satisfied at our exploration efforts of the day. 

            Tonight will be the last night we spend with our friends as they have to start heading back towards Marathon, so we have made plans to get together on our boat for dinner tonight.  We have just enough time to get back to our own boats, take showers and rest up for a few minutes before we try and make the most of what time we have left together.  This has truly been the highlight of our trip so far.  It has all been fun and a great adventure, but being able to spend a week with our friends and explore new places in these islands on the west coast of Florida has been really memorable.  Bob and I both said to each other that this has been the best week we have ever spent on the boat!

            I never had the time or energy to finish writing this last night, and as I finish this page this morning we have just said good-bye to our friends as they sailed off into the “sunrise!”  It was a sad farewell – but we have such happy memories of this week.  I really don’t know why I sound so morose – after trying to catch up with them for so long, now that we were in company for a week, we will probably see them off and on many times on the way back home!  And we have promised to get together for a trip recap when we both get home.

            For now, I’ll just sing to myself the lyrics to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally).

Heading back after a long day!