Warmer waters make for cooler cruising. Southern Boating publishes a U.S. Gulf Coast Regional Report each month to make your Gulf Coast cruising a success. Chock-full of information for everywhere from the panhandle of Florida to the tip of Texas—Southern Boating gives you the lowdown on all events, happenings, marinas, destinations, and more!
Skip Times Square. Try these New Year’s Eve Parties for Boaters
Times Square in New York City is the happening place to welcome the new year, and you could see yourself on national television, but for Gulf Coast boaters, there are other feel-right and, perhaps, feel-warmer options.
Florida
One biggie is the Beach Ball Drop at Pier Park in Panama City Beach, Florida. Like in NYC, you can watch the ball drop, but this “beach” ball is an 800-pound Waterford Crystal. If you have young ones in tow be there before 8 PM. That’s when a throng of kids screech and reach to get their hands on a real beach ball when 10,000 of them spill to the ground from overhead netting. Panama City Beach incurred damage from Hurricane Michael, but the event is still a go.
Down in Key West, the signature event is the “Lowering of the Pirate’s Wench” from the mast of the historic tall ship America 2.0 at Schooner’s Wharf. Eat, drink, and be merry. Also, be careful.
Consider cruising over to Orange Beach, Alabama, for Reelin’ in the New Year at The Wharf. The street party includes live bands, family-friendly fun capped off with the marlin drop and fireworks. Yes, marlin. The Wharf Marina has transient slips, but be sure to reserve early.
Up in Mobile Bay, be sure to get a good luck meal of black-eyed peas, collard greens, and Moon Pie. They serve a 55-pound Moon Pie in the courtyard of downtown’s Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel. What is Moon Pie? It’s a round confection of marshmallows squeezed between graham cracker cookies, a southern culture goodie traditionally washed down with RC Cola. After dinner, stay awake long enough to help 50,000 others count down the seconds to 2019 while a 600-pound Moon Pie look-alike is lowered into the new year. Stay for the laser light show, too.
New Orleans drops its city symbol, a 25-foot fleur-de-lis, from the roof of Jax Brewery in the French Quarter. Afterward, fireworks light up the riverfront.
Fill all your senses while boating in New Orleans.
“Off the beaten path” means different things to different people. For the cruiser tooling down the ICW or in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans, Louisiana, easily lives up to its reputation as the “northernmost Caribbean town.” It’s also surprisingly accessible to go boating in New Orleans.
The city offers respite, adventure, and full-service marinas, and bangs out a welcome to boaters like a long traveling note from a trumpet reverberating off the pressed tin ceilings in some dark, candlelit jazz club. Here, boaters are welcome.
City of Tastes and Sounds
At first glance, New Orleans is an inland city surrounded by towns of fishermen and charter captains plying the most productive estuaries and marshes in North America. The reality is quite different. The large 633-square-mile Lake Pontchartrain that forms the city’s northern border isn’t really a lake at all but more of a brackish tidal basin fully accessible from the ICW and directly from the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Sound. New Orleans is a natural harbor and destination for cruisers boating in New Orleans.
There’s a running joke by locals and natives of how every visitor’s story of traveling to New Orleans can be concisely summed up with some version of these words in no particular order, “Gumbo. Gumbo. Mardi Gras. Gumbo. Étouffée. Bourbon Street. Gumbo.” Perhaps that’s why most travelogues recommend making friends with a local over a beer and po’boy, which is solid advice, but cruisers and salty wanderers to New Orleans never have this problem, for the city’s marina district of West End is awash in the real deal.
A city of neighborhoods that hold their own distinct accents, one of the oldest is the West End. Built on reclaimed land from the lake in the 1830s, New Orleans’ West End is one of the most historical recreational and commercial boating districts in North America. The area comprises two public marinas, expansive parks, boathouses, and yacht clubs hosting nearly 1,000 slips for vessels capable of handling a nearly uniform depth of 12 feet in the lake. West End is an easy shot from the deepwater Rigolets Pass for transient cruisers.
Home to Southern Yacht Club—the second oldest yacht club in the western hemisphere—as well as the legacies of Jimmy Buffet hanging at pier parties in the 1970s and mercenary plots to conquer Caribbean island nations in the 1980s, New Orleans’ West End still holds its romanticism and connection to the past. The city’s largest marina, Municipal Harbor, is currently undergoing a massive $22 million reconstruction.
Along her quay, the city’s first-ever community sailing center is rising and will be home to Tulane, Loyola, and the University of New Orleans sailing teams as well as a bustling headquarters for multiple high school sailing teams all ready to add their sails to this legacy. On any given day, the National World War II Museum’s fully restored PT-305 can be seen slicing just off and along the seawalls and giving museum-goers a much more tactile experience and connection to that period of history.
Historic Haunts
The neighboring marina in Bucktown is home port for a fleet of shrimpers and crabbers. The proximity allows West End to host a legendary array of seafood restaurants, including the 140-year-old Bruning’s that was among those lost to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Today, the seafood restaurants have returned to the marinas, and the raft-ups at their docks have again become a standard scene filled with the city’s characters and liveaboards holding court at the bars.
Charming homes line the streets in the Garden District and beyond.
If your own boat isn’t enough, you can take a river cruise in New Orleans.
It wouldn’t be New Orleans without some impromptu jazz in the streets.
You can’t have gumbo without crawfish!
Coffee and beignets, a true New Orleans treat.
During parades and festivals, the porches of the building are filled with eager spectators.
The French Quarter’s legendary Felix’s Oyster Bar recently expanded to the lakefront and offers unparalleled views with your cold adult beverage and a salty dozen right off the boat. Sala serves a cool wine bar and small plate vibe mere steps from Orleans Marina. For the consummate New Orleans experience, simply grab a snowball. That’s a cup full of finely shaved ice laced with sweet syrup offered in a variety of flavors. Add a few pounds of boiled crawfish, and take in the views from the miles of seawall lining the lake filled with picnickers, rollerbladers, and joggers.
Surrounded by million-dollar condominiums and a resurgent middle-class neighborhood, West End is infinitely walkable. Get to groceries, coffee shops, sail lofts, haul-outs, and ship’s chandleries, all of which call the lakeshore home. Further east on the Industrial Canal are more full-service boatyards and the Pontchartrain Landing. That’s a unique marina, villa and RV park that’s evolved into a gated resort.
However, New Orleans is primarily known for the French Quarter with its seemingly unending array of bars and fine dining. The West End is a quick $15 Uber away or even cheaper bus fare. However, New Orleans is so much more than the French Quarter. Tourists rarely visit some of the best areas and neighborhoods. Ride the streetcars down St. Charles Avenue and marvel at the miles of mansions built when the city was the wealthiest in the nation. Stroll Magazine Street for its endless boutique shopping and quaint eateries housed in 19th-century shotguns and sidehall cottages.
Additionally, the city is gentrifying rapidly. There are too many restored historic neighborhoods to stroll or bike during a long weekend. Not long ago Marigny, Bywater, and Mid-City were dilapidated neighborhoods. Now, they’re teeming with young transplants renovating homes built more than a century and a half ago. New Orleans has been quietly booming and the national media is finally catching on.
Boating in New Orleans
At its heart, though, New Orleans is a maritime city. Home to one of the busiest ports in the nation, massive cranes serving freighters and container ships seem to hover above these historic neighborhoods along the Mississippi River. Innumerable charter captains also call this area home in between their commutes down to Venice and Hopedale where they make a living running sportsmen out by the offshore oil rigs.
For recreational boaters, West End is the epicenter and cruisers will feel right at home. On any given day, Olympic sailors can be found hobnobbing with sailmakers over local rums at the yacht clubs. Or over coffee, one can eavesdrop on an America’s Cup sailor’s tale to local U.S. Coast Guard men and women. New Orleans is defined and shaped by water, as have the generations who have called her home. Cruisers in search of their next off-the-beaten port should pull out their charts and pencil future NOLA memories into their logbooks.
Some 1,500 professional and home cooks compete for big money and national attention November 7-11 at the 7th Annual World Food Championships at The Wharf in Orange Beach, Alabama.
It’s a spectator sport now—you watch them cook at various events and then you taste their results at the World Food Championships.
The main event and sideshows are just a short walk from The Wharf Marina on the ICW, which is handy for Great Loopers and other mariners on the move. In fact, one event, called The Yacht Club, is held at the marina. Diners with special tickets move about the marina and board several yachts where they watch and chat up award-winning chefs. Then they devour their delicious masterworks right there on the boat.
Another side event is called BBQ Beach. Pitmasters and celebrity chefs demonstrate skills with smokers and ceramic grills. At The Steak Out, they compete to make the best steak and share steak searing secrets. At The Tasting Pavilion, food brands let you sample their goodies. If you have the Walmart app on your smartphone, they’ll let you in free. At World Food Games, you can even play with your food, sort of, with team competitions like Egg Tossing and Corn Shucking. Kids love this one. It’s all first-come, first-served, so order your tickets in advance at worldfoodchampionships.com
Is this post making you hungry? Good. Because we have all the recipes you need.
For more than 55 years, the tug New Hope was presumed lost. Now, New Hope is found, thanks to NOAA. And some deep-diving robots.
In 1965, the tugboat New Hope was taking on water in 20-foot tropical storm waves in the Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana. A leak in the stern didn’t help. When the seven crew members realized they couldn’t pump out water fast enough, they abandoned ship. A few hours later, the Coast Guard rescued them, cold and shivering but okay. New Hope sank, and no one knew exactly where…until now.
Early in 2018, during a deep-water exploration of the Gulf, NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer team located what is believed to be New Hope. The tug was upright on a sandy bottom 2,700 feet below the water’s surface. It was just about 80 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River.
New Hope was one of many discoveries—anthropological, geological, biological—by the NOAA team. During their April 11th to May 3rd exploration, they took on the deepest parts of the Gulf across all bordering states. Besides discovering New Hope, the team also took images of other previously located sunken vessels, including the World War II German submarine U-166.
A discovery from NOAA.
Two of their most valuable searching tools were remotely operated, deep-diving vehicles: ROV Seirios and ROV Deep Discoverer. Because of the ROVs’ ability to go deep, the team documented five new deep-sea coral communities and found what might be a new squid species.
They also surveyed unexplored areas of Perdido fold belt in the northwestern Gulf and gathered imaging and data for two areas along the offshore bank south of Texas and Louisiana being considered to expand the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, one of NOAA’s 14 federally designated underwater sanctuaries.
In mid-June, Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory got word that boaters were watching whale sharks on the surface just 20 miles west of Manatee and Sarasota Counties. That’s fairly close to the Gulf shoreline for this species, the largest of all sharks with some as large as 40 feet. The polka-dotted whale shark doesn’t eat other fish (or humans). It’s a wide-mouth filter feeder that survives mostly on plankton and fish eggs.
Mote researchers grabbed their gear and sped off in a 42-foot Yellowfin powered by three 400-horsepower Mercury Verado outboards. The team located five whale sharks from 20 to 40 miles offshore and took underwater and above-surface photos and videos to record each sighting. Furthermore, they were able to get close enough to tag two of the sharks with real-time tracking devices. In about six months, the implants will self-release and float to the surface. Mote specialists then will be able to remotely download timelines of water depths and temperatures.
One of the tagged whale sharks was about 25-feet in length and nicknamed Minnie. Yes, as in Minnie Mouse. This was a salute to the Walt Disney Company for its financial support of the implant project. Another, about 16 feet, is nicknamed Colt for Colt Nagler who assisted the team. His father, Captain Wylie Nagler, owner of Yellowfin Yachts, supplied and captained the fast, spacious vessel that helped make the expedition successful.
The Galveston Island Shrimp Festival is September 28-30 where some 60 professional restaurant and amateur chefs compete for the best gumbo. A boat and RV show is also a festival attraction. The Pensacola Seafood Festival is also held the last weekend in September.
FLORIDA
On Florida’s panhandle, Panama City Beach takes a full week for its annual Lobster Festival & Tournament September 17-23, and we’re talking Florida lobsters.
Port St. Joe on the shores of St. Joseph Bay hosts the Florida Scallop & Music FestivalOctober 5-6. The Destin Seafood Festival along the Harbor Boardwalk will be the same weekend through October 7th. A week later, October 11-14, Gulf Shores, Alabama, hosts the Annual National Shrimp Festival.
Niceville, at the top of Choctawhatchee Bay in Florida, celebrates mullet with the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival October 19-21. Down in Cedar Key, Florida, the Cedar Key Seafood Festival happens on the same weekend. This will be number 49 for the quaint island city.
Also, there are three events along Florida’s west coast the last weekend in October. St. Marks Stone Crab Festival is a biggie on October 27th and so is John’s Pass Seafood Festival October 25-28 in Madeira Beach. Naples Stone Crab Festival starts Friday, October 26th at Tin City, and stone crabs are served all weekend along the Old Naples waterfront.
Apalachicola is famous for oysters and caps off the shellfish festival season November 2-3 with the popular Florida Seafood Festival held at Battery Park at the mouth of the Apalachicola River. Watch the bands play, blue crabs race, and the oyster-shuckers shuck. See the fleet blessed, and shellfish lovers relish in their feast.
In 1921, a severe hurricane hit the west coast of Florida near Clearwater Beach. Its tidal surge sliced a long barrier island in two: North Hog Island and South Hog Island.
Today, we know them as Honeymoon Island State Park and Caladesi Island State Park.
Hurricane Pass, the appropriately named inlet, takes Gulf boaters into St. Joseph Sound and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway between Palm Harbor and Dunedin, just north of Clearwater. Caladesi Island to the south is accessible only by boat, but it has a marina with floating docks and water and electrical hookups, a restaurant, and kayak trails through the mangroves. A hiking path leads to what used to be the home of Henry Scharrer, who came to the U.S. from Switzerland when he was a young man.
In 1888, Scharrer worked in Tampa and bought a used sloop. During a shakedown cruise, a storm blew up so he sailed through a pass just north of Clearwater Beach and anchored in the calmer water behind Hog Island. The storm left but Scharrer admired this beautiful place with a safe harbor and stayed. He built a cabin, raised hogs, caught fish, grew vegetables, and having “proved up the land, became a U.S. citizen.”
From time to time, Cuban fishermen visited Scharrer to trade goods and exchange gifts. They loved Hog Island, too, and had described it as caladesi (beautiful bayou). Hog Island became one of Florida’s original tourist attractions, and Scharrer gave walking tours of the island to snowbirds. He met and married Kate McNally from Ireland, and they had a daughter, Myrtle. Sadly, Kate died when Myrtle was only seven, but her daughter quickly took over her mother’s chores, including gardening, gathering food, preparing meals, and baking bread. She also loved to explore Hog Island from the beach to the backcountry.
Shiver me timbers, it’s the Louisiana Pirate Festival!
The 2018 Louisiana Pirate Festival dates back to 1957 and was recently voted a “Top 20 Event” by the Southeast Tourism Society. Many Gulf cities have pirate festivals, but Lake Charles has a story to go with it. It is said that Jean Lafitte and his pirates used to hide out in Lake Charles and buried lots of contraband on its shores. Should we start looking?
Every year, citizens of Lake Charles fight the invading pirates. Cannons boom and festivities are widespread, but the good citizens always lose and the mayor is forced to walk the plank.
Cruisers can reserve a fully-serviced slip at Bord du Lac Marina on the eastern shore of Lake Charles. With 40 transient boat slips, the marina is only a short walk to the festival held in and around the Lake Charles Civic Center.
From May 3-13, tempting Cajun food beckons up and down Galley Alley while uplifting Louisiana music swirls in the air, much of it live. Saturday, May 5th salutes mariners with a boat parade and the “Show Us Your Dinghy” contest. The “Dress Like a Pirate” parade takes to the streets on Sunday.
Children have extra fun things to do at McDonald’s Little Matey Children’s Area with Captain Crabbe where they can join in the Pirates Got Talent competition and the “How to Play with Your Food” cooking class.
The inaugural Louisiana Pirate Festival Costume Ball will take place at the appropriately named Buccaneer Room of the Civic Center on Friday, May 11th. Tickets begin at $45 and proceeds benefit the St. Nicholas Center for Children.
Stars appear to be lining up for a new Mote Science Education Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida, with a design that will catch the eyes of millions. Many power boaters and sailors are familiar with Sarasota’s City Island on Lido Key, where Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium brings the marine environment up close and personal with exhibits that include reef animals and sharks.
To bring the marine experience closer to landlubbers, Mote Marine has its eyes set on a five-acre parcel within Sarasota’s Nathan Benderson Park along Interstate 75 near University Parkway for its proposed 110,000-square-foot aquarium. That is with one million gallons of exhibit water.
The new Mote Science Education Aquarium will be twice as big as the City Island aquarium. It will also house increased displays, interactive teaching labs, onsite diving programs, and expansion of its family-focused education and outreach programs. Not to mention, plans to encourage young people to get involved in ocean science and technology.
Estimating around 43 million visitors each year, the facility needs Sarasota County’s approval of the lease and with continued fundraising efforts, construction could start as early as 2019.
The songbirds are flying home. We know swallows come back to Capistrano every year—an old song tells us that—but Gulf Coast birders hum their own songs every spring when warblers, orioles, grosbeaks, tanagers, and many other migrating flocks come back from their winter homes in Mexico, Central America and South America. The melody makers wing it over hundreds of miles of the Gulf of Mexico until they reach land. They’re looking for trees and brush, bugs and berries. Birders and binoculars are waiting. Expensive cameras on tripods are pre-focused and hoping rapid-fire shutters capture a birding magazine cover.
Nourished again, the migrating birds fly out to points north where the summer weather is most suitable. Their instincts tell them where to go and primarily follow one of four major flyways—Pacific, Central, Mississippi, and Atlantic—where the weather suits their feathers.
Best Viewing Areas on the Gulf Coast
So where, exactly, are the best viewing areas on the Gulf Coast to watch the songbirds migrate? Audubon Club websites for various gulf coast areas have it nailed. Fort DeSoto Park at the entrance to Tampa Bay is a biggie. Also, check out birding festivals in late April and May. Corpus Christi, which owns the moniker of America’s “Birdiest City,” puts on the “Birdiest Festival” April 20-23. Galveston FeatherFest Birding & Nature Photo Festival is April 17-22. The Cajun Coast of Louisiana is ground zero for the Mississippi River Flyway, so birding there is amazing. The Grand Isle Migratory Bird Celebration is April 21-23. The Annual Great Louisiana BirdFest in Mandeville is April 13-15.
“Sandtastic” Sculptures at the Pier 60 Sugar Sand Festival
They say the sand on Clearwater Beach is the best on the Gulf Coast, if not the world. It’s a very fine, sugary quartz crystal brought to what is now Florida’s Eastern Gulf
Coast shoreline by rushing, ancient rivers. The rivers are long gone, but the sand is still there and every April, the sand gets shaped into “sandtastic” sculptures at the Pier 60 Sugar Sand Festival held this year April 13-22. The theme is “SEA America, a Celebration of America’s Treasures.” Artists will use about 1,000 tons of sand that they will mix with water and pack into big wooden forms to create surface tension. They create their sculptures with trowels and other tools, including toothpicks for those very fine details.
The centerpiece of the show is the Sugar Sand Walk Exhibit under a cool 21,000-square-foot beach tent. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for adults over 55, military personnel, police officers, firefighters, and teachers (I.D. required), and $6 for students up to age 17. Artists go to work on April 14th. The festival features free activities, too, such as a children’s play area, street musicians and performers, craft displays, fireworks, and sculpture demonstrations. Boaters can tie up at Clearwater Beach Marina and walk to the festival on the beach. And, in the typically calm waters here, many boaters just drop anchor outside the swim zone then paddle or putt-putt to shore.
The two sister beaches of Sanibel and Captiva are some of the prettiest in the world.
It’s 7:30 and the sun is already well above the horizon. As I step out onto the dock, an osprey circles above a school of sea trout holding in a nearby channel. There’s a decision to be made now, and I carefully consider my choices: Do I pull up a chair on the bay side with a beautiful view of Pine Island Sound or walk 100 yards to the Gulf shore to see what new seashells have washed up overnight? It’s a tough choice, I know, but I’m happy to have options, which is what the beautiful Floridian isles of Sanibel and Captiva are all about. This morning, I’ll look for shells.
A Likely Pairing
Wedged between Charlotte Harbor to the northeast and Estero Bay to the southeast, Sanibel and Captiva are the largest in a chain of barrier islands that come across as super-tourist yet surprisingly laid back. Relatively long and narrow, they offer easy access to the Gulf of Mexico for serious offshore fishing adventures and open-throttle cruises. At the same time, this is where Florida’s Gulf Coast Intercoastal Waterway (ICW) begins, allowing boaters to tuck inside Pine Island Sound where waters are generally mellow but some routes run shallow. Between these entertaining access routes, Sanibel stretches for roughly 12 miles while Captiva sprawls for another five. Both offer sandy beaches, amazing shelling, fine dining, plus a small-town feel that belies bountiful amenities and provisioning potential.
Historically speaking, Sanibel and Captiva have endured a few weather bumps over the years. A pair of hurricanes tore through here in the 1920s and Hurricane Charlie, a
category four storm, crushed the area in 2004. So bad was the devastation after Charlie that many marinas, resorts, and businesses had to completely rebuild. In doing so,
however, most reset the bar with significant upgrades. The local community also decided to work hard at balancing their tourist-based economy with a deep respect for the
environment. That choice turned out to be a winner as the islands bounced back with a vengeance, their tourism buoyed by the recognition of how big a role access to clean water and abundant wildlife plays in attracting visitors.
Arriving
Getting to both Sanibel and Captiva is fairly straightforward. Both are accessible by land or boat. Since there are no marinas residing seaward on the Gulf front, the vast majority of boaters approach from the ICW in Pine Island Sound. If you’re coming from the open Gulf, however, you can tuck inside to easily reach Sanibel Marina at Point Ybel, or slide through Redfish Pass to reach the marina at South Seas Island Resort on Captiva. Note that Blind Pass, another passage to the ICW, carries a low clearance designation on the charts.
Once on the inside route, Jensen’s Captiva Island Beach and Marina Resorts, McCarthy’s Marina and the marina at ’Tween Waters Inn Island Resort & Spa provide easy access
to Captiva. From any of these, you can walk to the Gulf-side beaches, or grab a cab or bike to reach other destinations. To access Sanibel Island, opt for either Sanibel Marina or
Port Sanibel Marina. While seas are generally mild on the inside approach, be aware that some cuts outside of the main channels have water depths of five feet or less at mean low
water. Thus, if you have a deep-draft vessel you might want to rent something smaller to cruise around after tying up your primary rig. Either way, watch out for manatees, which are plentiful throughout the system.
What we talk about when we talk about leisure
Once settled in, let the fun begin. Outdoors lovers and fitness buffs will absolutely love this area; opportunities to get out and do your thing are not only widely available, they are often enhanced. On Sanibel, for example, you’ll find 25 miles of paved bike paths. Captiva has no official bike routes, but you can cycle the main road from one end to the other, and Cayo Costa State Park, a short boat ride to the north of North Captiva Island, features six miles of wooded biking/hiking trails plus nine miles of open beach for walking and running.
If you would rather stay on the water while getting in a workout, fear not. Kayaks and stand-up paddleboards (SUPs) are widely available. At Sanibel Pilates and Ambu Yoga you can meditate on the beach or try SUP yoga. To tour by paddle power, head over to Adventure Sea Kayaks at ’Tween Waters Inn on Captiva and enter the small cove in Buck Key to find seahorses, jumping mullet and all sorts of bird life. More adventurous paddlers can hook up with Tarpon Bay Explorers at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge. There, an hour-and-a-half kayak tour leads through one of the largest
mangrove ecosystems in the country. It is magnificent.
Feel like trying something completely different? Sanibel and Captiva are among the top shelling destinations in the world. What’s shelling, you ask? It’s just as it sounds; you
walk the beach gathering interesting and beautiful seashells. The difference here is that beaches like Bowman’s Beach on Sanibel or Blind Pass (Turner Beach) on Captiva will find
you ankle-deep in shells. More than 250 varieties wait to be discovered here, some of which are exceedingly rare, of scientific significance or even worth a few bucks. A large junonia shell, for example, can bring $150 at a local shell shop; someone finds one nearly every week. When you’ve finished collecting for the day, be sure to check out the
Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum.
Happy as a Clam?
For some shell collectors, the best shell on the beach is not the perfect shell but rather one with a flaw, a little round hole and a true story that goes with it. That clam was murdered in cold blood. The clam was the victim of a carnivorous sea snail, and it wasn’t
a fair fight. The sea snail used its tongue as a secret weapon. The tongue, called a radula, drilled a small, round hole through the clam. Then its multitasking tongue sucked the nutritious life out of that mollusk.
You’re right; it’s a shell-eat-shell world out there. Buried-in-sand bivalves can be
found on all Gulf barrier islands. Pensacola Beach has a lot. Some shell collectors string them up as necklaces. The beaches of Sanibel Island near Fort Myers have shell abundance and variety, including many murdered clams.
Sanibel’s South Florida geography helps. Unlike other barrier islands in this area, Sanibel Island has an east-west beach that traps sought-after shells from southern waters, including the Caribbean.
Anglers, too, have plenty of options in these waters. Sea trout, redfish, and snook abound inside Pine Island Sound. On the Gulf side, tasty tripletail hang near buoy chains, sheepshead surround rock piles, and king mackerel cruise nearshore waters. Offshore, snapper, grouper, mahi, and tuna are on the menu while jack crevalle, summer flounder,
and snook can be caught at most passes. Boca Grande Pass to the north of Cayo Costa is famous for its tarpon run in late April and May. Capt. Ryan Kane at Southern Instinct
Fishing Charters can put you on the fish.
Dining Options Abound
As for dining out, it’s hard to go wrong here. Among dozens of fine eateries, The Lazy Flamingo has restaurants on both Sanibel and Captiva. Catch your own fish and they’ll
cook ’em three different ways. Doc Ford’s Rum Bar also has establishments on both islands. This is a great family retreat with a unique, Caribbean menu. Try the Yucatan Shrimp, with real butter, garlic, mild Columbian chilies, cilantro, spices, and key lime juice. On Sanibel, the upscale Sweet Melissa’s is a heathy choice that sources locally, while the Blue Coyote Supper Club is a golf club bistro serving steaks and other
American fare.
Additional places to dine on Captiva include the romantic Mad Hatter, plus Old Captiva House at the oft-mentioned ’Tween Waters Inn. In addition to great eats, the latter spot
has hermit crab races! There are also five Captiva restaurants on Rossi Lane, just a short stroll from both Jensen’s and McCarthy’s marinas. All are worth a visit.
For dining right on the water, Sanibel-Grandma Dot’s serves up terrific sandwiches and salads in an open-air setting at Sanibel Marina, while the Green Flash on Captiva offers a
nice selection of appetizers and soups, fresh grouper, salmon, Mahi, and tripletail—plus choice ribeye steaks and veal chops.
The best time? Anytime
While Sanibel and Captiva can be enjoyed year-round, March/April and October/November are ideal weather months and therefore see the most visitors. Afternoon thunderstorms are typical in the summer and September is usually the quietest month, but be advised—many of the island’s businesses operate on reduced hours or shut down completely in late summer for renovations and vacation.
Regardless of when or where you tie up in this secluded neck of the woods, you’re in for a rare treat. Sanibel/Captiva isn’t a destination you land on by mistake. It’s a special excursion to be premeditated for sure, but once you’ve arrived, odds are you’ll make the same effort to return over and over again, each time turning over a new leaf—or seashell, as it were.
Glancing at your charts, Sanibel and Captiva might look like nothing more than a couple of big sand spits, but they certainly pack a punch as standout boating destinations. The
townsfolk are friendly, the marinas are professional, and the great outdoors are front and center every day, everywhere. Indeed, there’s no way to fully cover these gems in a single short visit, but as I mentioned at the outset, it sure is nice to have choices.
Cruiser Resources
MARINAS
Jensen’s Captiva Island Beach and Marina
Resorts, Captiva
Vessels up to 40 feet
(239) 472-5800 gocaptiva.com
McCarthy’s Marina, Captiva
Vessels up to 24 feet
(239) 472-5200
Port Sanibel Marina, Sanibel
Vessels up to 65 feet
(239) 437-1660 portsanibelmarina.com
Sanibel Marina, Sanibel
Vessels up to 100 feet
(239) 215-2445 sanibelmarina.com
‘Tween Waters Inn Island Resort & Spa, Captiva
Vessels up to 130 feet
(239) 472-5161 tween-waters.com
The Florida-Alabama State line slices through fine, white, panhandle sand. It also slices through a cultural hangout you may have heard about—Kenny Chesney and Jimmy Buffet sang about it, and its annual mullet-tossing contest has been newsy. Yes, it’s the Flora-Bama Lounge and Oyster Bar.
Flora-Bama is drawing new lines in the sand with beach competitions for special causes. One is the Beach Run/Walk for America’s Warriors on Saturday, March 24th. Flora -Bama is the start and finish line. Half-marathoners run east into Florida and return at the
half-way mark, while 5K runners head west into Alabama and turn back at their half-way mark. Flora-Bama donates all entry fees to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which helps severely wounded warriors and families of Special Ops warriors killed in the line of duty.
The other competition is the Annual Mullet Man Triathlon, a warmup to the annual Interstate Mullet Toss held the last weekend in April. With prizes for men and women in a
mix of categories, including first-timers, proceeds benefit the Leukemia Lymphoma Society.
St. Patricks Day comes on Saturday, March 17th, so put on your Irish and go out “on the lash.” Crawl the pubs, gobble corned beef and cabbage, sing along with street musicians, and cheer the bagpipers. Just about every city on the Gulf is raising a toast to its Irish traditions with St. Patricks Day Events.
Corpus Christi’s (TX) Cassidy’s Irish Pub is the center of attention with Irish dancers, Irish bagpipers, Irish food and, gulp, green beer.
New Orleans (LA) has at least three parades and meet-ups. One authentic place to be is the Irish Channel Neighborhood near the Garden District—Parasol’s Bar is the hub—which hosts an all-day street party.
Biloxi (MS) has a Grillin’ on the Green BBQ competition, an arts and crafts show and live music. There are afternoon festivals and parades in Waveland, Long Beach, and Biloxi, and when the sun goes down, the O’Blarney Society rolls out floats and bagpipers for St. Patrick’s Night in Pascagoula.
Mobile’s (AL) Bienville Square downtown is the site for an Irish Stew Cook-off.
Pensacola (FL) has a beer-flavored, crazy-dress-up 5K run then a parade by properly-dressed U.S. Marines.
Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach (FL) have live music, pub crawls, and parades.
Bradenton and Sarasota (FL) have block parties with Irish-flavored bands and pub crawls—ditto in Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach, Naples, and Key West.
Tampa’s (FL) Riverwalk puts an exclamation point on its downtown celebration. If you go, take a good look at the Hillsborough River. Yeah, it’s green.
Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota has created a free smartphone app for Florida boaters to report red tide algae blooms, the first red tide reporting app of its kind. Karenia brevis, the species prevalent in the Gulf of Mexico along the west coast of Florida, sometimes blooms out of control, and its toxins kill fish, shellfish, mammals, and birds. It also impacts public health.
The new Mote Citizen Science Information Collaboration (CSIC) app is for Android and iOS smartphones and is listed as “Mote CSIC” in the app store. See something? Smell something? Send in a report. Real-time reports from boaters help scientists from Mote and Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute pinpoint the location, confirm the type of bloom and determine the proper response.
Another new-tech reporting tool is a little, yellow submarine nicknamed Waldo. Waldo carries BreveBuster, a Mote-designed instrument that detects red tide. Mote scientists can launch Waldo and steer it to a red tide bloom and determine its shape, size, and intensity. mote.org
