Going down the ICW on a beautiful Saturday

Experienced Loopers told us we probably would want to do our traveling on the Intercostal Waterways (ICW) on weekdays and leave the weekend water to the locals. We stayed on the mooring ball in Sarasota waiting on mail (and weather to clear) and when the mail did not come but the sun came out and seas calmed down we just had to move on. We figured we would make Cape Haze where we have some cousins we wanted to see by evening. We needed to recharge our batteries (from anchoring/mooring out the last week) and decided we could rent a car to go back to pick up the mail and replenish supplies on Monday. While a little crowded the waterway was full of good people watching and not many boaters felt like we were going too slow to show respect and rock us. We had the first real experience of bridges we were too tall to get under. It is a $20,000 fine to request a drawbridge to be raised when you don’t need it up so you pay pretty close attention to the height of your boat. We are 16 foot with the radar mast lowered so we go by that. The radar mast takes us to 22 ft. height but it is just too easy to lower to take a chance. One lesson learned is that our charts do not tell us the names of the bridges and if you merely describe the location when hailing the bridge master you are ignored. The 3 bridges we needed raised (or swung in one case) had no names on our charts so we had to wait until another boat came and used the name to get it raised. It caused some delay but nothing unreasonable. We are going to do a little better homework from now on and print out the bridge names in the future. We got into Cape Haze Saturday evening and have a great end dock and plan on getting out the bikes and meeting up with the cousins who live a couple of miles away from the marina. Cool nights—75 degree days—we have died and gone to heaven.

Swing Bridge going into Venice



Favorite House at the end of Siesta Key

Siesta Key where we spent a couple of vacations--on land