Day 2-Let My People Go!

Sunday, March 21, 2021.
Weather: Temp: 67/54, Humidity: 87/53%, Top Wind: 13mph, Precip: None, Miles Traveled: 55

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I don’t know what Fort Myers did to deserve this plague, but one night was enough for us! Midges. They look like a mosquito, but thank goodness they don’t bite!! Here’s a close-up. They fly into your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, every nook & cranny of the boat…. aghhhh!

You can’t really see how many there are, but this area of the boat was sheltered from any breeze, and these rascally buggers just piled up back here. Agh! They were everywhere! Kenny sprayed the whole boat down with water, and they didn’t even care. I guess they’re water based bugs like skeeters, so water doesn’t bother them.

We looked up “midges”, and apparently these bugs like stagnant oxygen deficient water. And “they” (whoever “they” are) say that the water coming down the river from the Okeechobee is the problem. Great! Just Great! We’re headed that way towards the Lake!

We’d spray them, and they’d just fly around and land again. 😖. We used our snazy little electric tennis racquet bug zapper inside the boat to try to keep them from taking up permanent residence. They aren’t hard to swat, thank goodness. But Kenny was so crazed with killing bugs that he didn’t even want to go get donuts at Bennetts! WHAT?! 😳. He was adamant about getting out of Egypt to escape the plague.

Oh – remember dinner last night? Here’s looking back at the marina – that is how close Joe’s Crab Shack is to the marina.

We planned to only go 14 miles up to the Franklin Lock today, so we figured we’d leave the marina around 11:00, and that gave us time to go get donuts, and then just mosey up river to the lock. We had reservations at the Franklin lock campground for $15/night, including power. (Thanks to our Lifetime Senior National Parks Pass!). But after this infestation plague, we were afraid that these dang bugs would be bad there too, so we decided to take as few days as possible to get out of the Okeechobee waterway and into the Atlantic ICW. So I called the River House Marina in Moore Haven, where we have reservations for tomorrow night, and asked if we could switch that to tonight. YAY! Yep – he had one spot open for tonight – no problem. So we’ll just forfeit our $15 at Franklin and get some more miles behind us.

As we left Fort Myers, we entered into a seasonal manatee zone. You can’t read the fine print, but it is a no wake zone from November through March. It’s really a good idea to have binoculars onboard, because sometimes it’s the fine print that matters!

And here is why….. a power plant that has nice warm effluent water that the manatees like to spend the winter in.

Finally after a half hour or so, we were allowed to “resume normal safe operation”.

This is the river scenery here as we were approaching the Franklin Lock.

There was a sailboat in front of us, and we just tootled on in behind him. This lock lifted us about two feet, and it was pretty uneventful. We’ve kind of forgotten how to do this! 🤔

Here’s the mileage… 121 miles to the Atlantic ICW to the east.

I took a gander at the weather for crossing Lake Okeechobee on Monday, and it looked good. Sweet! We don’t have to spend another buggy day waiting for Tuesday to cross. Although – we were pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t buggy in the lock! We still had a bunch of freeloaders on the boat, so once we cleared the lock, I got out our fancy new battery powered leaf/bug blower. Seriously! I blew bugs around while we were going 9 mph up the river, and that did help alleviate some of the bug population. We just kept swatting and blowing bugs around, hoping they’d jump ship.

There are some really nice homes along the Caloosahatchee River. Most of the waterway is farmland and homes, along with a few orange groves. It’s not bad scenery. But I can’t figure out why anybody would want to live on the Caloosahatchee River. It is brown, brown, brown water…. with a chance of gators.

We had one bridge that needed to be opened – the Denaud Swing Bridge. Thankfully we only had to wait a couple of minutes for the bridge tender to waddle on out to the center to the pivot point to open it for us.

More Caloosahatchee River scenery.

Since we got such a late start for going farther than we planned, we really had to calculate and watch our timing to make sure we could make it through the next lock in time to get to Moore Haven. The locks only operate until 5:00, with the last lift at 4:30. We were barely going to make the Ortana lock in time. So we tried to make up some time by going fast…. but it wasn’t easy because there are so many docks with boats on this river that we couldn’t just blast by with a giant go-fast wake. Here’s our track for today…. the yellow lines are where we went 20mph. The red arrow is the last lock.

We were a little nervous about getting here in time, but actually made it by 4:00. This one was a four foot lift.

Remember I said that we forgot how to do this? Ha! Yep. The lock doors open just a little bit and let water flow in to fill the lock chamber. It swirled around on the left side, and came up around as a current from behind us on our wall. The lock has ropes hanging down about every 20 feet. Kenny had a line at the stern, and I was on the bow with a line. I goofed up and placed my line around the forward bow cleat. That was fine until the boat wanted to zoom forward toward the lock gates in the current, so I would pull tight on my line to try to hold the boat from going forward. What that really did was pull the bow into the wall, so the stern would kick out, and then Kenny couldn’t get the stern close into the wall. I kept fighting, he kept fighting. We didn’t realize what was happening and that we were actually pulling and fighting each other until later. And to top it off, there was a boat behind us with a family that had three young children who were just having a nice peaceful easy float. What the heck?! Oh well – we laughed once we figured out what I did. 🤷‍♀️. I’m such a dork.

We made it to Moore Haven at about 6:00, got slid into our spot, and I insisted that we deserved Little Beers to celebrate our great accomplishment. And you know what? We hardly saw any bugs in either of the locks, and I don’t think we acquired any new ones here. I think all of them that are on board came with us. Darn freeloaders! So we continued to swat, spray, blow, and kill bugs. 😳🪳🖐

Here’s our spot at the marina… all tucked in, right where the old dock and new dock meet. For $1.00/ft, we get a secure quiet dock spot with power and water! And we are less than a quarter of a mile from the next lock, so timing in the morning is really easy.

After a long day on the water, and in a little remote town, I decided to make a little more room in our freezer, so I took out a pork tenderloin. I pulled out the instant pot, and in a half hour, we had an amazing dinner! Yum! I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring the instant pot, because it takes up some space…. but I’m sure glad I did! It can fix good stuff really quick!!
There was another looper boat named Beachside docked behind us. We chatted with Tom and Diane a bit, and they invited us over for after-dinner-tails. We had a really enjoyable visit and they are fun people. They haven’t looped yet, since they are waiting for all the covid issues to be history before they go. They want to go to Canada, which doesn’t look like a great possibility this year.

There is actually a swimming pool and bathrooms here, but we never even left the dock!

Our plan for tomorrow is to go through the Moore Haven lock, cross Lake O, transit the Port Mayaca Lock, and travel down the St Lucie river to just before the St. Lucie Lock. There is another park there for $15/night that I quick made reservations for. We’ve stayed there before, and that is where Beachside is headed tomorrow. That will be about 65 miles and then we’ll be almost out of the Lake Okeechobee waters, and turn NORTH!