Tuesday, 24 February 39.7 SM
There’s not a lot to be seen of Pine Island Sound this day. Not much at all of Pine Island, Sanibel or Capitiva. Fortunately, Gulf Inland Waterway is well marked, most dayboards no more than a quarter-mile apart, so one is just able to discern a shape that should be the next marker ahead in the gloom.
Porpoise play in the wake of a tour boat off Cayo Costa.
The murk is thick. For once, NOAA got it right, having posted this morning a “Dense Fog Advisory” for waters along the southwest Florida coast. But coastal cruising can be a matter of choosing one’s poison. With showers and thunderstorms forecast for several days later this week, a fog alert doesn’t seem so bad.
Besides, when motoring out from Burnt Store at 0900, Charlotte Harbor is cloud-covered but calm and perfectly passable. A tad on the hazy side, perhaps, but not so much so as to obscure the jagged charcoal chalk stripe along the horizon some ten miles off that is Cayo Costa. That would be the day’s first turning point, the junction with the GIWW. That’s also about where a murky mist moves off the Gulf to fill Pine Island Sound.
There’s not much to be seen but the channel markers.
It’s worth noting that the waterway likewise fills with motor vessels large and small, heading both north and south. Most seem in need of repair, their throttles clearly not fully functioning. How else to explain that these vessels buzz by at 20 or 25 knots, despite such limited visibility? Must be that they have no intermediate throttle setting between dead stop and full speed ahead. (See result of speeding in fog at http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/high-speed-powerboat-hits-florida-beach-crashes-bar-article-1.2127011 )
The waterway being well marked, Steadfast motors slowly southward, one marker to misty marker. There is the brief moment of confusion—fog will do that to a sailor—but no close calls with shoals or passing boats. Once through the “Miserable Mile” once again, Steadfast again turns to Tarpon Point, where—waddya know?—the fog lifts to the tops of the high-rise condos that ring the harbor, giving a clear view of the channel in.
Other than fog, and the occasional speeding motorboat, this has not been a day for sightseeing. But Tarpon Point is sight most welcomed: safe harbor.
Steadfast out.
At Sea with Steadfast 
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