Traveling on the ICW on Florida's Gulf Coast

One more week until we’re in the car heading to Grandad’s for Thanksgiving, then north to St. Mary’s to see the children, then home. Bittersweet, mixed feelings about going back. We have loved this trip. It’s nice, first of all, to actually live together instead of Brian traveling all the time and me being home. That’s been different for us. Somehow the “to do” list is significantly shorter and it gets done in less time. We cook meals. 

The good thing is that next summer we get to do this again for three more months! 

The ICW (the Intracoastal Waterway) is another new kind of waterway for us. Like the other waterways, it’s a combination of natural rivers and lakes linked where necessary by man-made canals. I love the way the scenery changes every day. We have passed enormous posh houses, lots of tall condos, a few small houses, several natural areas for birds and wildlife, a park with a bike path, man-made canals that are very boring, rivers and bays, trailer parks, big cities and small marinas. It’s been very shallow in some spots, but generally it’s at least 10 - 20 feet deep. We’ll be on the ICW on Florida’s Gulf coast until we reach Fort Myers and we’ll continue on it through Lake Okeechobee next year to reach the east coast. It goes all the way to New Jersey.

Here they have a different way of tying up the boats at the docks. The docks are very low and fixed, with very tall poles; you have to lasso the pole with a long line to keep the bow in place. I’m getting better at it now, but it’s still confusing. Our fenders are as low as they can be without dragging in the water. I don’t have any idea why docks are so different in different parts of the country. 

Florida is very HOT. I thought November was supposed to be mild and pleasant, but it has been in the 90s and very sunny for several days, actually making me look forward to our cold Connecticut days. Everything on the exterior of the boat is covered in big chunks of sea salt and everything inside is clammy. (Except now we’re running the air conditioner all the time.) Also, there are bugs. They are invisible and they bite your legs and itch, itch, itch. All in all, it is better to just stay inside.

I had just about given up on recycling when we finally started finding recycling bins again here in Florida. We haven’t recycled anything since leaving New England. It just doesn’t seem to be what people in the middle of the country do - everything goes into the trash! I hope this will change.

This may sound silly, but I love the way skin dries so quickly after it gets wet. Not like sox that are dry one minute and soaking wet the next, and not like towels that take hours and hours to dry. Skin dries immediately - a very handy situation when you live on a boat.

I should mention some of the Florida cities we have visited:

Miramar Beach - I felt like we had been dropped from the sky into an affluent shopping mall. We never saw any homes or neighborhoods, just the mall. 

Carrabelle - for Loopers, this is one of the most important places on the itinerary and for some reason we expected it to be a cute and charming little town, but it wasn't. 

Clearwater - a nice place. It had a great beach, a wonderful craft-market, and very good restaurants.

St. Petersburg - all we saw was a clunky marina.

Sarasota - it seemed very clean and sterile, or maybe it was just too hot and sunny that day.

Palm Island - this seemed like a very nice place, but again, all we did was spend the night in the marina.