Sunday, February 24, 2013 – Pelican Bay to Ft. Myers (40 miles):

            Woke up again to really thick “pea soup” fog.  It should take us about five hours to get to Ft. Myers, so we are wondering when we will be able to “get outta here.”  It stays light enough to travel till about 6:30 p.m. so the latest we could leave would be 1:00 p.m. , but this fog, hopefully, will be long gone by then.   The odd thing is that I know where we are going, and we are going to be tied up in exactly the same spot at the marina we are going to, so I am relatively confident that I don’t have to look for “danger around every mark”, but that’s exactly when “bad things happen to good people!”  My motto – “It’s always better to be skeptical!”  Just when we think the fog has burned off and we will have “clear sailing” and we are out there, the fog will come rolling in again, and that would not be fun!

            So I made another nice breakfast, and we cleaned up and at least got everything ready so we could leave when the weather clears.

Our anchorage in Pelican Bay

            Ha Ha – I think I had a premonition or I just know the way things are bound to happen!

            The fog burned off (or so we thought) about 9:30 a.m., so we pulled up the anchor, which came up surprisingly clean and started to head out of Pelican Bay.  There seemed to be a little haze on the horizon, but we were following other boats and thought the little bit of fog that was left would burn off very shortly.  WRONG!  The fog rolled back in so thick, we had to stop dead.  Frighteningly, you couldn’t see anything!  There was another boat behind us who was ringing a bell, and not remembering all the rules of what to do in fog (because I swore I would never, ever be out in fog), I got out our bell (which I had to dig around for in the front locker on the fly bridge – and actually had the thought that maybe I should just climb in the locker and hide) and seemed to remember that you had to ring it every minute.  Fortunately, we had not gotten completely out of Pelican Bay, and managed to turn around and go back to the anchorage where we stayed until we were positive the fog would give us no trouble.  We were listening on the radio, and boats were calling everywhere with their positions and wanting to know if any other boats were in their vicinity.  I don’t know why there weren’t any collisions!  We did hear another boat named “Lena V”, which was interesting.   Around 11:00 a.m. we decided the fog has dissipated enough to try again, and this time we made it out into the channel, but there were boats everywhere – some that we had seen leave our anchorage – so I don’t know what they did or where they went, but they didn’t get very far!  So forget about what I said a few sentences ago about the second half of our journey not being nerve-wracking!

Saying Good-bye to Pelican Bay

            It was hot in Pelican Bay, but it is cool out in the channel.  The water is calm except for all the wakes from the boats, and there are zillions of boats out here.  It is just like a weekend in the Chesapeake Bay including the chatter on the radio which is mostly, “Thanks for the wake, you !@#$%^!”, and boaters telling each other to get off the hailing channel and go to a working channel.

            We followed the same “path” back to Ft. Myers that we took to get to the islands we explored, so we always had plenty of water, but I was surprised to notice that passing boats seemed to be stirring up a lot of mud.  That gave me cause for concern, but we never had any trouble.  Once again we had the dolphins playing in our wake, but we heard on the radio someone notifying the Coast Guard of a dead dolphin they had seen.

Happy dolphine playing in our wake!

            We arrived at the City of Ft. Myers Yacht Basin around 3:00 p.m. – sooner than we had anticipated, and were tied up in the same space that we were before.  Once we got tied up and hooked up, showers were in order.  Then we decided to rent a car for tomorrow as Enterprise gives a discount to boaters here at this marina, and we have several errands to run.  We will plan on touring the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford estates and grocery shopping while we have the use of the car.  Hopefully, this time we will really be able to tour these houses, which are supposed to be very interesting and worthwhile.

Passing by Cabbage Key on our way to Ft. Myers

            Tomorrow looks like a nice weather day, Tuesday it may rain, and Wednesday we leave here. 

Bob just informed me that he double-checked the proper procedure for the use of a bell in the fog – but that’s only if you are caught out in the fog, and I’m not going anywhere if it’s foggy or even thinking about being foggy!