Cayo Costa to Cape Haze to Venice

Once we extracted ourselves from the anchorage & tight exit at Cayo Costa, our 1 hour trip  to Cape Haze was pleasant. Our goal at Cape Haze was to check out a state park island . . . just because.

Our anchorage was wonderful. It was in a little cut out bay off of the intercoastal waterway and was surrounded by homes on one side and the waterway & mangroves on the other.

During the trip up the intercoastal, one of our generators pooped out. That's never a good thing! Once we were anchored at Cape Haze, Jim spent quite a bit of time troubleshooting. Fortunately, he found the problem and even better, we had a spare part for it on the boat. A primary circuit breaker for the generator just died and believe it or not, we had one in our spare parts stockpile. PTL!

After a late lunch, we headed through the mangroves for the state park to see what was there.

They had a very nice shelter house.

The beach was long and deserted. Notice that you don't see any other footprints behind us.

Though the sea was flat calm, it still was breaking pretty powerfully in this section of the beach.

This appears to be a popular area for finding shark teeth. This guy had a specialized seine he used to sift through shells in search of teeth.

Believe it or not, we found 21 teeth in our mile-long beach stroll. Wow! We'll show you a picture of them in just a minute!

On our way back, we came upon this bridge in the middle of the mangroves so of course we had to investigate the other side of it.

Here are the treasures we found today. This is the first time EVER we have found shark teeth. Wow, so kewl!

The evening on our little bay was spectacular. No wind and not too cold. This was the view before sunset on Tuesday morning.

Our 20 mile trip today ended up taking more time than it normally would have - before the morning was out, it was quite the white knuckler!

We had several swing bridges to go under so we dropped all of our antennae down to minimize our height. We have to be careful because Florida can fine you up to $25,000 for requesting a bridge opening when you don't actually need it!

This swing bridge was supposedly 21' in the middle and 24' on the sides. We are 20' tall so we watched it quite closely.

There were a number of these marker buoys that appeared to have been knocked over by a pretty severe storm surge. The anhingas seemed to enjoy them.

Today, we had lots of dolphins. This is a fun sequence.

The seem to love to launch and splash.

The following short video appears to be a male and female dolphin. For the longest time, he would launch out of our wake as if to impress his lady. Then he would swim under & around her and nibble on her dorsal fin. She would do a barrel roll away from him as if trying to play hard to catch. He would then do another launch & splash & try again. This went on for maybe 15 minutes.

Though you can't see what he's doing in the video, it was an amazing show of affection. You could see his teeth but he never hurt her. Just making passes. Enjoy the video!

Dolphins he/she playing

Not long after the dolphins left us we hit a wall of fog which was pretty crazy for this area. It was so thick that we needed our radar to show us where the channel markers were. Worse, as the channel narrowed, we couldn't see the sides which were actually quite close so we had to use the radar to help us stay in the middle.

At one point, we saw a boat headed for us on the radar and laid on our horn in time for him to avoid us. Phew!

Notice the red marker ahead of us. This was before the fog got real thick.

Here's a shot of our radar display. This was looking out 1/2 mile. You can see the 2 large blips at about 1/4 mile away. They are red and green markers that we have to go between but we couldn't see them until we were almost on top of them. Fun!

Fortunately, the fog lifted right before we hit Venice. This is a lovely mural on their high school.

We tucked into a tight little marina at the outlet to the ocean - the Crows Nest.

After a late lunch on the boat, we got our bikes down and headed for downtown Venice to see what there was to see.

The bike path went through a nice city park.

We had fun poking around the various shops in the historic downtown area. As luck would have it, there was a geezer group having a great time playing in a gazebo right downtown. We got some ice cream and enjoyed their Great American Songbook standards.

By the time we got back to the boat around 5:00, the fog had rolled back in. 

If the fog hangs around tomorrow, we may have difficulty getting to Sarasota. I guess we'll see what the 'morrow brings.