To help you see where we are, here’s a little map. We are the blue dot in the lower right at the north tip of Estero Island. Sanibel Island is to the west of us. The town of Fort Myers is up the Caloosahatchee River from here.
At the Pink Shell Resort & Marina, the marina is on the bay side of the island. Across the street is the rest of the resort with pools and a nice big beach. As visitors of the marina, we have full access to all of the resort amenities, including the beach, chairs & umbrellas, kayaks, pools, restaurants, etc. Here’s an overview map. The red circle is the main pool, and the yellow circle is the pool we like to go to which was changed to an adult only pool this year. 👍
This is the main pool where families like to play and hang out. There is a restaurant and bar on the left under the yellow umbrellas. There are corn hole games around, there are kids art projects to do, music playing, a waterfall to play in, and it is a lively happy place. You can also see the yellow umbrellas out on the beach from here. There is even bar service out on the beach!
This is the pool that we like. It’s pretty quiet with some more relaxing music playing in the background. The bar waiters make the rounds so you can order up, (although we generally bring our own snacks & beverages from the boat). We did have some children here today, so I asked the waitress about it. She said it was designated as adult only, but with the Covid precautions, they removed that designation as a way to help people spread out more. 🤷♀️ Bummer. Most of the day, the kids that were here were really quiet, but we did have a couple of jumper/splashers show up for awhile.
This is looking back across the street toward the marina on the bay side. It isn’t far.
The pool has tall hotel buildings on two sides, so it isn’t quite as luxurious resorty feeling as Marlin Bay down in Marathon. And this pool is hardly refreshing. It is warm! The water coming in is barely cooler than the pool itself. I guess it’s probably pretty hard to cool it down when the air temp is in the 90’s during the day and the 80’s at night.
But looking west is nice, out toward the gulf and beach.
There are some pretty gardens here.
We sat under an umbrella for awhile, but we were just dripping sweat sitting in the shade. So into the pool. Not much better! The pool was way warm. Man it’s crazy hot & humid these days! I saw this …
Someone came up from the beach and said it was hot and the water was hot. Then Kenny reminded me…. when we were coming across the Gulf yesterday, he checked a bunch of temperatures in the engine room. The water temperature coming into the engines was 87 degrees. 🤯 YES! CRAZY! Maybe I’ll go check it out tomorrow.
We came back to the boat around 6:00 to cool down and fix some dinner. I heard some thunder, so I stepped outside to bring in our towels and saw that this guy is back, and he’s fishing from a swinging cord! I asked the Google about him and found that he is a Snowy Egret, also known as “golden slippers”. I think his name is Edgar Egret. He perched here for quite some time, and every once in awhile he would crouch, cock his head to one side, then dive his beak in the water and chomp down on a little fish. Talk about good balance!
We had lots of thunder and a big storm cloud develop. There wasn’t any sense going over to the beach to watch a sunset tonight! The thunderstorm went on for several hours, but surprisingly we didn’t get much rain. It was really quite the light show after the sun set.
I don’t know what we’ll do tomorrow. Usually when we stay here, we walk or ride our bikes into Ft Myers Beach, or even over the bridge to Doc Ford’s Restaurant. But I heard someone close to me say “THERE AIN’T NO WAY” in this heat. 🤨. I tend to agree. There is a trolly that runs between here and there. It’s timing is hard to figure out sometimes, but maybe we’ll try that. I think it runs about every 50 minutes or so…. roughly.