| |
I FOUND OUT ON our attempted crossing of the Gulf that sailboats don’t always go exactly where you want them to go. It wasn’t like driving somewhere in a car, where you just steer it the way you want to go and keep making the turns you need to make until you get there. On a sailboat, the wind dictates everything, and even though the boat can sail in every direction except straight into the wind, sudden changes in direction and intensity can make getting anywhere frustrating. No matter how much Terry adjusted the sails and tried to make progress to the south, the wind wanted us to go more to the southeast. We were getting farther and farther away from the land we left behind on the northern Gulf coast, but we just couldn’t seem to get closer to Mexico or even to the big gap at the bottom of the Gulf between Mexico and Florida. Terry said that in addition to the wind, there were probably currents in the water pushing us the wrong way, even though you couldn’t see them.
Although Terry had said we should be able to sail as close as a forty-five degree angle to the wind, it turned out that the Apocalypse, with her old, recut sails, just couldn’t do that well. The best we could manage, according to the angle Terry estimated by looking at our compass course in relation to the direction the waves were coming from, was about seventy-five or eighty degrees. This meant that unless the wind really changed direction again, we were not going to be able to sail south straight out of the Gulf to the Yucatan or anywhere else. By the second night, we had been pushed so far to the east by these unfavorable winds that we were only a little more than a hundred miles off of the west coast of Florida.
Terry was furious at the thought of being so close to Florida and possibly having to stop there, but Mom and Janie both hoped we would. After the first night at sea, Janie said it was boring as hell out there because all you could see was water. Mom was nervous because we were alone out there and she kept wondering how we would get help if something happened to the ship or somebody got sick. I figured if anybody did get sick, it would be Terry because he would have a heart attack from staying so upset all the time. When the wind wasn’t blowing enough to sail, he paced around the deck adjusting lines and looking up to the tops of the two masts or out at the horizon as if he might see a breeze coming. When the wind was blowing the wrong way, like it was now, he kept trying to make the boat point higher into it, either by trimming the sheets until we stalled or tacking to the other side to see if we could make progress that way. As he plotted our progress on a big paper chart using the numbers he got from the GPS, he got madder and madder that we were not where he’d hoped to be by now. Even though I had never been there, I could see on the chart that Florida was a long peninsula that we were headed straight for, and we were even with about the middle of it, in the area of Tampa Bay. Terry said the closer we got to the shore the harder it would be to sail around that long peninsula, and if the wind would just change a few degrees, we could go straight south and get out of the Gulf a lot faster.
The wind didn’t change, though. It stayed steady out of the south-southwest and increased from a light breeze to about fifteen knots. We were moving pretty fast, running at around ten knots, and that would have made Terry happy if we could do it in any other direction. But the best we could do was aim for Florida at a point about halfway between Tampa and the bottom end of the state, meaning there was no way we could avoid nearing the coast soon, unless we wanted to keep tacking back and forth to stay offshore, going nowhere. Mom was dead set against that and so was Janie. Mom said that we should just stop in Florida and anchor for one night so everybody could get some rest, and maybe the wind would change so we could sail on south the next day.
“Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” Terry muttered. “That’s the trouble when you get near any coast. The landmass affects the breezes and changes everything! The whole west coast of Florida this far south is mostly mangrove swamps and shoal water; with sandbars everywhere decently remote and all the harbors deep enough to anchor in surrounded by condos and marinas. Then there’s Everglades National Park and all the government regulations that go with it. It’s the same in most of the Keys. Don’t ask me how I know because I’ve sailed there before.”
Seeing the Everglades sounded exciting to me. I’d never even been to a national park before and I didn’t see why visiting one wouldn’t be a good thing. Terry said most of the park was just water anyway, so it seemed to me like it would be perfect for us, since we were on a ship. We had to go right by it anyway, and it wasn’t like trying to get to somewhere in the middle of the state like Disney World, where you had to have a car. Janie didn’t want to go to the Everglades at all because she said there was nothing to see there but snakes and alligators. She said she’d rather go to Miami Beach if we were going to Florida and she didn’t see why we couldn’t since we could get there by water too. Terry said Miami was out of the question and besides, if the wind did force us to make landfall in Florida, we weren’t staying long enough to act like a bunch of “tourons” going around everywhere taking pictures. His fervent hopes that the wind would change did him no good, however. By the afternoon of the forth day after we’d left Orange Beach, Alabama, we caught our first glimpse of land dead ahead in the distance.
Terry’s chart showed that it was Sanibel Island, and just to the south of it and behind it, you could see tall buildings that were the condos and hotels of Ft. Myers Beach. On the chart it looked like there was an area of protected water behind Sanibel Island, and it looked like there might be a good place to anchor just south of the short bridge connecting the island to the mainland. As we got closer to land the details of Sanibel Island came into focus. The first thing I noticed were the groves of tall, dark green trees that all looked alike but weren’t like any trees I’d ever seen before. Terry said they were Australian pines and that Florida was full of them. He didn’t seem to think they were neat at all, but he did get excited when we got close enough to see a few tall palm trees mixed in with the strange pines.
“Coconut palms!” he announced. “The icon of the tropics and a good sign that even if we are still in America, we’re headed in the right direction!”
I didn’t know much about palm trees of any kind because I’d never seen one before last week, except in pictures and on TV. There were several different kinds along the shore in Alabama, but they were nothing like these. The coconut palms were a lot bigger and more majestic looking. They had long, feathery fronds that waved in the wind from way up top of their tall trunks, some of them curved and leaning out right over the water. I knew why Terry was so excited about them, because he had been telling us the whole time we were building our ship that the coconut palm was one of the most important plants in the Pacific Islands, where we were going. He said not only was the coconut meat inside the nuts a source of food and oil, but the water inside the green ones was the purest and best-tasting water on the planet. He said the fiber from the husks was used for making rope and in some places people even still used the fronds for making the thatched roofs of their houses. But Sanibel Island sure wasn’t one of those places.
I didn’t know a lot about rich people because I didn’t know any back in Calloway City or where we’d lived in Indiana before that. But even I could look at the houses on Sanibel Island and see that it didn’t look like anybody who wasn’t rich was living there. As we passed by the south end of the island to reach the protected cove behind it, I studied the houses through Terry’s binoculars, marveling at how big they were and how perfectly landscaped everyone’s yard was. There were all kinds of interesting plants and trees I’d never seen before, most of them palms and jungle plants of some kind, but a lot of them looked like cactus and other desert plants too. Most of the houses had big glass windows so the people that lived in them could get a good view of the Gulf, and there were big screened in porches attached to all of them. Terry said they had to have them to live here because Florida was a mosquito-ridden hellhole that would be uninhabitable without screens and air conditioners. He said that before those inventions, half of the state was a wilderness that still had wild Indians, and land was so cheap it was almost free. Now it costs a fortune for even the tiniest parcel of flood-prone dirt with a view of the water. He said most of the people that owned houses like the ones on Sanibel Island were so rich that these were just winter getaways and they really lived in places like New York or Boston most of the year.
When we got to the place behind the island, there were no boats anchored there and Terry thought that was strange. Looking at the chart in advance and now seeing it with his own eyes, he said it was a good, safe place to drop the hook in all but the worst weather, and he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t full of cruising sailboats like most good anchorages in Florida. As we motored farther north towards the bridge, keeping the island about a quarter mile off of our port side, we came to an opening in the land that turned out to be a channel leading into a small marina.
“That’s why they’re not anchored out,” Terry said. “Money’s not an object here, so they just take a slip in the marina when they come through.”
“Look! There’s a sign that says ‘Free Overnight Docking!’” I said, excited about the possibility of staying there and getting to explore the island on foot before it got dark.
Terry saw the sign too when I pointed it out, but not believing it, he grabbed his binoculars to read the smaller print at the bottom: “With the purchase of five hundred gallons of fuel!” he spat with disgust. “Five hundred gallons! That’s over two thousand dollars! How generous of them to offer to let you tie up for the night if you spend two thousand dollars on fuel!”
“What would anybody do with five hundred gallons of fuel?” Janie asked.
“Burn it up in a couple of days, if they’re on one of those motor yachts with the on-board washer and dryer that you’re so keen on! They’ll go through five hundred gallons just to get as far as we’ve come since leaving Mobile.”
“What do you think they’d charge us to dock there if we didn’t buy all that fuel?” I asked, still hoping.
“We’ll never know, because I’m not asking. But you can bet we can’t afford it! And why would we want to, when we can drop the hook out here for free and have the whole anchorage to ourselves with a better view? Get ready to lower away, Robbie! I’m coming about!”
There were a few people in sight, most of them walking on the beach as we set our anchor and got settled in, and some stopped long enough to watch us for a few minutes but they didn’t wave. Terry said we could still check out the island, all we had to do was blow up the dinghy and put the outboard on it. Mom was happy about that because she wanted to get back on dry land after being out of sight of it all those days, and she also wanted a meal she didn’t have to cook. I just wanted to get a closer look at all those weird plants and trees, and Janie wanted to look at boys (and probably try to find one that had a joint he would share).
Since there weren’t any other sailboats anchored there and we didn’t know where to go to land the dinghy, Terry just headed for a narrow sandy beach where people were jogging and walking their dogs. It looked like a park of some kind and had a lot of shade from a dense stand of those dark Australian pines. We were just pulling the dinghy up on the sand when a man who looked like he probably lived in one of the expensive houses came over and said we couldn’t land there. He said boats weren’t allowed on the beach and that if we wanted to come ashore, we’d have to go to the marina. When Terry told him our catamaran was too wide for most marinas and that the docking fee was too expensive besides, the man said anchoring where we were near the island was prohibited.
“The Sanibel city council has just recently passed a ‘no anchoring’ ordinance. The only exceptions are for vessels needing emergency repairs or those seeking shelter from threatening weather. Overnight anchoring is not allowed.”
“That’s bullshit!” Terry told him. “Whatever city council you have here has no right to control the water. I don’t care how much your shoreside real estate is worth. These are navigable waters and as captain of my ship I can come and go upon them as I please!”
“You’ll get a chance to tell that to the marine police, then. All I’m doing is informing you of the law. And if you go ashore and leave this dinghy here, you’re just going to make matters worse.”
“Fine then! I was planning to take my family out to dinner in one of your overpriced restaurants, but if my money’s not wanted here, I’ll keep it! But we just sailed in from a four-hundred-mile passage across the Gulf. I’m not weighing anchor until my crew is rested and the wind is fair for the passage south!”
“Let’s just go somewhere else, Terry,” Mom said, as we headed back to the Apocalypse in the dinghy. “It’s not worth another hassle with the police and the expense of more tickets. Can’t we find someplace better to anchor? Someplace legal?”
“The hell with legal! We’re doing nothing wrong anchoring here. Florida’s definitions of what’s legal and navigational reality are two different things. They’ve been trying to pull this kind of crap for decades. All those rich bastards from up north come down here and buy up all the waterfront property so they can see the ocean, then they get pissed off because somebody in a sailboat anchors in their view. They pay so much in taxes for their over-priced real estate that it burns them up to see people like us enjoying the same water without paying a dime. They bitch and complain to their city councils and local law enforcement agencies, and the elected officials give them what they want for fear of losing the salaries those ridiculous taxes enable. All you have to do is follow the money to understand it.”
“What if they put us in jail?” I asked. “You said we’d probably get put in jail if we went to Florida.”
“Not for dropping the anchor! They won’t and they can’t! All these anchoring bans are good for is intimidation. It works on most boaters so they keep doing it. They might tow away some old derelict with a drunken bum living aboard in a canal, but they can’t stop cruising sailors like us from taking a break!”
We found out Terry was only partly right when we got a visit just before sunset from a county sheriff’s department patrol boat. The two deputies tied up alongside the Apocalypse and came aboard to do the usual search. When Terry asked them what the problem was, they informed him of the local anchoring ordinance and said that they weren’t going to make us leave immediately without sleep, but that we could stay there no longer than twenty-four hours because we were in a restricted zone.
“Restricted for what?” Terry demanded. “We’re well outside of any navigational channels and not in anyone’s way.”
“It’s a Homeland Security restricted zone,” the tallest of the officers replied. “It’s our job to patrol these waters looking for suspicious vessels and this happens to be a buffer zone between the open Gulf and the ICW and Caloosahatchee River. We have to keep it clear and because of that, transient vessels are discouraged from anchoring here. But since you’re already here, we’re going to have to inspect your safety equipment and take a look around down below.”
Naturally, the safety equipment list came up short—because we didn’t have a Type IV throwable PFD on board! When one of the officer’s pointed this out and pulled out his citation book to write the ticket, Mom gave Terry a look like she wanted to slap him for throwing that free one over the side. These deputies didn’t like our Porta Potti any more than the Alabama marine policemen did either. They couldn’t fine us just because it was empty though, because Terry showed them our GPS tracks which proved we’d just sailed in from the open Gulf. The deputy that did all the talking told us that we’d better install a real head if we were going to be staying in Florida waters, and he also informed us that we would need to purchase an out-state cruising permit or pay for Florida registration. Terry said we weren’t staying here but one night and that when we hauled in our anchor tomorrow, we were leaving U.S. waters for good. The deputies weren’t interested in where we were going or why, but before they left they said they would be back at the same time tomorrow and that we’d better be gone.
After they left, Mom wasn’t happy about having to cook the same old rice and canned food we’d been eating while we were sailing. Janie and I weren’t excited about it either after thinking we were going to get to eat in a restaurant, but food was the least of Terry’s concerns. He was happier being on the boat than anywhere ashore anyway, but he was really fuming about the way people here were treating us.
“Second-class citizens in their eyes, that’s all we are! Just because we don’t fit into the mold and look, think and act like everyone else.”
“I thought Florida was supposed to be a paradise for boaters,” Mom said. “I’m shocked that they make it so hard on us.”
“It was, back in the day, but all that’s changed now. Like everywhere else in this country, it’s completely screwed. I hope I don’t have to keep telling you why it’s imperative that we leave ASAP!”
I hoped he didn’t either, because I got tired of hearing about it all the time, especially the part about everything collapsing. I did wish people would be nicer to us than they were, but I didn’t think it was as bad as Terry said it was.
While we waited on dinner, Terry spread out his charts to plot our escape from Sanibel Island, the state of Florida and the United States, saying we were leaving at first light if the wind was even the least bit cooperative. He pointed to an inland route that he said the ICW took here at the Sanibel Island/Ft. Myers area, sneering at the thought of using it because it was the route all the powerboaters and sailors who’d rather motor than sail took.
“It’s a shortcut to the East Coast, but it goes through canals and crosses Lake Okeechobee right though the middle of the state.”
“If it’s a shortcut, why don’t we take it?” I asked.
“Because we can’t sail it, that’s why. It’s an inland route that’s effectively a trap. With locks and drawbridges to go through, we’d be at the mercy of others just to transit. Imagine what would happen if we were there during the collapse and the poop really hit the fan. We’d be sitting ducks and never get out! No sir, Robbie, there’s no way in hell we’re taking that chance. It’s back offshore from here for us. We’ll just have to hope the wind is fair so we can sail south to the Keys and finally break out into the Atlantic where we’ll be free of U.S. waters at last.”
The Atlantic! It was hard to believe that we were about to be on the real ocean, maybe in another day or two, Terry said, if the wind was good enough. Things already looked so different here, I couldn’t imagine what they would look like in the real islands. Terry said Sanibel Island wasn’t a real island because it had a bridge connecting it to the mainland. He said half the so-called “islands” in Florida were like that, but where we were going, not only did the islands not have bridges to anywhere else; a lot of them didn’t even have roads on them at all. He said there were people living in some of those places that had never even seen a car, much less ridden in one.
The next day when we woke up, the wind was still blowing out of the south-southwest, right in the direction we wanted to go. Terry had hoped it would change by now so we could bypass heading for the Keys and go straight to Mexico liked he’d talked about before, but that didn’t happen. We left the anchorage and Sanibel Island at a pitiful two knots, the little eight-horse Mercury struggling to drive the Apocalypse along against a ten to twelve knot wind. Terry said if it got any stronger, we wouldn’t be able to make progress at all. Once we got a half-mile or so from the coast, we raised the main and jib and tried to sail south along Fort Myers Beach. With the wind at the angle it was, we kept getting closer and closer to the beach and then we would have to turn and try and tack back out to get some room. With the way the Apocalypse didn’t like to sail into the wind, every time we turned on this other tack, we were going north of due west just to make headway. It was frustrating because that was almost the way we’d come from. If it was going to be like this, it was going to take forever to get all the way south of Florida to the Keys and into the Atlantic.
The coastline here was mostly straight, running in a north and south direction. There were areas of tall condos and other buildings and other areas where there was nothing but woods. Terry said the thick, emerald green trees that grew right out into the water in these places were mangroves, and that we’d be seeing them from now on because we weren’t going anyplace that wasn’t tropical. He said there were a lot more of them in the Everglades, and that’s where he’d now decided to try to get to that first day, because we couldn’t make enough headway to the southwest to get around the end of the Keys. He said we could anchor somewhere along the Everglades coast, because there was nothing there but wilderness and the only cops we’d have to worry about would be the park rangers.
To get there we had to first go past a place called Marco Island. Terry said Marco Island was about the last place on the west coast of Florida that was a town or anything—everything south of that was just mangroves until you got to the Keys. Mom and Janie wanted to stop there, because they sure didn’t want to go to the Everglades because they said they were scared of all the snakes and alligators there. Terry said that was nonsense and that Marco Island was even worse than Sanibel when it came to anchoring prohibitions. He had read in some of his sailing magazines before we left Mississippi that there was an ongoing legal battle over anchoring there and that the water cops in that area were the worst in Florida. He said he’d rather put up with snakes and alligators any day over more of that kind of crap.
But like it or not, we ended up stopping in Marco Island anyway. In fact, we ended up right on the beach. It happened when the steady southwest wind pushed us too close to shore like it had been trying to do all day. Terry tried to bring the ship about on the other tack so we could make some distance away from the land to deeper water. When he steered the bows through the wind so it could catch the sails on the other side, he did it too slow one time and we kind of stalled out, ending up in a situation that Terry said sailors call “in irons.” We could have gotten it straightened out, no problem, but the trouble was, we were way too close to a long underwater sandbar that jutted out from the beach when it happened. Even though the Apocalypse only draws a little over two feet, this sandbar area was so shallow that we got stuck when the wind and waves drove us backwards onto it.
Terry screamed and cussed like I’d never heard him do before. He was even madder than he was when that barge forced us to run aground on the Tenn-Tom. This was a lot worse, because the water wasn’t calm like it had been up there, and the waves were causing us to bounce up and down on the bottom, jarring the whole ship every time it hit and making it hard to stand without losing your balance and falling. We weren’t far from the beach at all and a bunch of people who looked like they were on vacation were staring and pointing at us like they’d never seen a ship like ours before, which they probably hadn’t. Terry said to quit looking at them and help him get us off the sandbar. He said we had to do something fast, because the longer the ship was pounded there by those waves the harder aground she would get and we’d never get her off. I jumped in after him and he yelled at Mom and Janie to do the same. Unlike on the Tenn-Tom, the bottom here was sand, and we didn’t sink into it much, but even with all four of us pushing, we still couldn’t budge the massive Apocalypse.
One man from the beach who looked like he was about twenty-five waded out there to help us. He was one of those muscle guys you always see on movies and TV shows that hang around the beach in places like California. He wasn’t wearing anything but a tiny little swimsuit that barely hid his private parts. I figured somebody with muscles like that could just about push our ship off without any help, but we still couldn’t make any progress. As long as he was out there, Janie sure wasn’t helping because all she was doing was staring at his body. One time I even noticed Mom looking too, but she turned her eyes away real quick when she knew I saw her.
It was clear that just pushing wasn’t going to get us back to deep water, so Terry said we’d better get the dinghy inflated and try to set an anchor. The muscle guy, who said his name was Mark, offered to stay and help us, and Terry said that would be good, because it was probably going to take a lot of cranking on the winch to pull us off once we got an anchor set. The wind didn’t show any sign of letting up either, and Terry said the biggest worry he had was that the tide was going to be turning and would start going out soon. When it did, there wouldn’t be enough water to float the Apocalypse off that sandbar, and we would be stuck there for the night.
Just about the time we got the dinghy pumped up and had mounted the outboard to it, a big orange inflatable boat that looked like a cross between a giant dinghy and a big patrol boat showed up, slowing down in the deeper water about a hundred feet farther out from where we were stuck. When the boat turned sideways to us as it drifted, I could see big white letters painted on its side that said “Marine Towing.” I was excited now, thinking we wouldn’t have to do all that hard work with the dinghy and winch after all. I hollered at Terry that somebody was here to help us and when he looked up and saw the boat, he just started cussing again.
“No, he’s not here to help, he’s here to help himself to our cruising kitty! Outfits like that are nothing but modern day wreckers, the scourge of the coast, looking to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune! He can go back where he came from, as far as I’m concerned!”
“Your insurance will cover the tow,” the guy named Mark said.
Just as he said that, the VHF radio came to life with a call for the captain of the Apocalypse from Marine Towing of Marco Island. Terry was going to ignore it, but Mom pleaded with him to at least talk to the man.
“You never know,” she said. “Maybe he won’t charge us much. Maybe when he sees we’re a stranded family, he’ll pull us off for nothing.”
“Keep dreaming!” Terry said. “Don’t forget where we are. This is Florida, dear!”
He picked up the radio mic and answered the waiting towboat captain. The first thing the other man said was that he just needed to see our insurance policy and he’d pull us right off. Terry looked at the rest of us with an “I told you so” smirk and then spoke back into the microphone. “We don’t have any insurance, and we can get ourselves off this sandbar, no problem.”
“Roger, Captain. I understand. But I can accept cash or a credit card as well. I can have you back afloat in deep water for five hundred dollars.”
“Five hundred dollars!” Terry practically screamed into the mic. “We’ll sit here all week before I pay you five hundred dollars for a five minute job!”
“Roger, Captain. Understood, but you are aware there’s strong front coming through, aren’t you? That southwest wind is going to clock around to the west and then northwest by midnight, and when the next high tide comes in before daylight, it’ll put you right on the beach.”
We didn’t know about the change in the weather because Terry had been so focused on getting away from Sanibel Island and trying to sail south that he hadn’t bothered to check the forecast again. The sun had been shining all day and the wind was the same as it had been for the past two days and nights, so he hadn’t seen any reason to. He replied that with Mark’s help and our winches and anchors, we could get our ship back off the sandbar ourselves.
“Roger, Captain. Understood. I’ll stand by just in case you have problems and change your mind.”
“See what I mean?” Terry said to the rest of us. “Just like a circling vulture waiting for its prey to die! He’s going to sit there watching, just hoping we can’t get it off ourselves so he can collect that five hundred dollars when we fail. Well, it’ll be a cold day in hell when that happens!”
Two hours later, as the sun was nearing the horizon and the tide was running out, making our situation even worse, it was quite clear that we had failed in our attempts to free the Apocalypse. Even with an anchor set in deeper water out in front, and even with Mark’s bulging muscles cranking on the winch handle, we were getting nowhere. And Mark said he had to go because he had a class to teach at the gym. Mom and Janie were begging Terry to let the Marco Island Marine Towing boat pull us off, and finally, just as the sun was setting, Terry reluctantly waved him over.