Chapter 11 By Boat Across Florida Sept to Dec 1992 From Marathon in the Keys we cruised north across Florida Bay to the west coast of Florida, spending almost a month in Port Charlotte doing interesting things like getting married and renting a van to visit the Salvador Dali museum in St Petersburg and buying a load of art supplies and construction materials. We also bought two huge loads of groceries to carry us through the upcoming winter in the Bahamas. Oborea  was two inches deeper in the water than she had ever been! In mid October at Boca Grande, the mouth of Charlotte Harbour, we met up with our friends David and Neila on their catamaran Windchime and together sailed north to Sarasota. There we spent another month and built our new refrigerator, completed the new hatches over the bunks and repaired a damaged section of rub-rail. By the end of November it was time to head to the east coast on our way back to the Bahamas. We said goodbye to David and Neila and sailed south forty miles back to Boca Grande. We left a bit late and the winds were light so it was after dark before we made the inlet, but while still in the gulf we had a school of dolphin play around our bows for twenty minutes, their forms outlined in phosphorescence as they dived beneath us. We anchored for the night a mile inside the cut. The next day was mostly calm and we motored down Pine Island sound and into the mouth of the Caloosahatchee River, heading inland and anchoring for the night off Cape Coral. The following morning we listened to the countdown as a space shuttle took off from Cape Canaveral, and ten seconds later we saw the smoke trail climbing into the air 130 miles dead ahead of us. It lingered for many minutes until it was finally scattered by the wind. The calm at our level continued however and we motored on up the Caloosahatchee and through the first lock of the Okeechobee waterway at Franklin. Oborea has made more than 120 passages through 52 different locks and we thought we had seen it all, but the five locks on the Okeechobee Waterway have no sluices, they fill and empty them by opening the main gates! It was a bit alarming the first time to see the gate at the head of the lock open a foot to admit an eight foot waterfall but there was surprisingly little turbulence. Once above the first lock we were in the rural interior of Florida, travelling through marshes or cattle ranches. Spoil banks rim much of the river and we had to climb a few feet up the mast to see over. We stopped that night at the town of LaBelle which has a small public dock with room for three of four boats; these were all taken however and we anchored fore and aft near the north bank of the river and rowed in. LaBelle is a farming community serving a considerable area and for its size has a huge supermarket and excellent hardware store. This is possibly the best supply stop on the Okeechobee Waterway. Two more locks the next day raised us to the fourteen foot elevation of Lake Okeechobee at Moore Haven. We took on fuel at a marina while an alligator basked on the opposite bank. Lake Okeechobee is over twenty miles in diameter, but is very shallow. The deepest sounding is about fourteen feet, while the whole southwestern part of the lake is a sawgrass swamp, not navigable by conventional boats. In years gone by hurricanes used to blow the water out of the lake and flood the surrounding countryside, so in the 1930's a dyke or levee was built completely around the lake to contain it. This makes the water completely invisible from the highways that follow around it, and from the lake the only signs of towns are the tops of water towers; it is like a secret lake. The fill for the levees was taken from the lake and this has formed a deep channel all the way around the edge, the Rim Route. It is 10 miles longer than the route across the center of the lake, but there is a lot more to see, and it is perfectly protected in bad weather. For the first part of the rim route it was hard to tell we were on a lake at all, both banks of the channel are heavily forested and festooned in spanish moss, real bayou country. When it was possible to get a glimpse toward the lake all that was visible was a sea of grass. We anchored fore and aft in one of the wider parts of the channel and at sunset the mosquitos came out in force, millions of them and all hungry. Luckily Oborea has full screens and we beat a hurried retreat below. All night weird cries of marsh birds echoed around us and the frogs sang their lungs out—the whole choir from trebles to basses. Before first light the bass boats were out, small high speed planing hulls with huge outboards. They roared off into the swamp in all directions to their favourite fishing holes and were soon gone with little wake, leaving us to putt along in the early morning mist surrounded by birds—birds everywhere. We saw seven varieties of heron and egret. Cormorants and their fresh water cousins the anhingas dried their wings on either bank. Gulls and terns flew overhead while ospreys and kingfishers defended their territories. In the tall trees turkey vultures roosted overnight and turned their backs to the rising sun with spread wings to absorb its warmth, and as soon as the ground warmed up too they were off riding the thermals hundreds of feet into the air without a flap of their wings. The eastern part of the rim route at last opens out. It still follows the shore close to starboard, but on the port side the open water of the lake extends to the horizon. That evening we headed out a mile into the calm lake to anchor well away from the bugs off Port Myaca, the eastern exit from the lake. Just below the lock at port Myaca is a railroad lift bridge with an open clearance of 49 feet, this is the limiting clearance for the whole waterway and keeps out a lot of sailing yachts, but we would just make it. (minimum depth of the waterway is six feet, and width 50 feet) and then we were into the St Lucie Canal, long straight reaches through citrus orchards (although they were again often hidden behind high banks) to the St Lucie lock that lowered us to the St Lucie river and sea level. The river here winds through mangrove swamps which have in spots been drained and cleared for enormous Florida mansions. At Stuart the river broadens out and was full of boats (during the previous 150 miles of the waterway if we saw five other yachts it was a busy day) and five miles farther on we rejoined the familiar waters of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway between Fort Pierce and West Palm Beach. We turned south to Lake Worth to do some last minute shopping and to await a weather slant to carry us back across the gulf stream to the Bahamas.