Fort Myers Beach

Steve made chili for our last night at the Legacy Harbour Marina and we had Kay & Bob and Libby & Clark for dinner on our boat, proving you can have dinner for 6 on a 34' Mainship. We had such a great time with them at Legacy, but the weather was warming up so it was time to head out. Libby and Kay came out to "conch us out" of the harbor. It had been too cold for our entire stay for them to conch the sun down, which is their usual tradition. Here they are on the dock holding their conch shells.

and here they are conching us out as we actually leave our slip at Legacy.
I took a very short (8 second) video of their warm up session if you want to hear the actual sounds they produce, it'll be at the end of this post.

We had a very pleasant sunny cruise to the Fort Myers Beach Mooring Field where we plan to stay about a week. We passed under the Sanibel Island Causeway where the highrises of Fort Myers Beach can be seen in the background under the bridge.

A little closer to the beach, we turned toward the beach and followed the markers into Matanzas Pass, a busy harbor between Estero and San Carlos Islands.

The harbor is filled with marinas, a USCG station, shrimp boats, dockside condo's and restaurants and a city run mooring field right in the middle of it all. For $13/day, you can tie to one of the 70 mooring balls, get a pumpout whenever you need one from the mobile pump out boat and dinghy into the Matanzas Inn dinghy dock to use the showers, laundry, get water, or leave your dinghy for the day to explore the fun town and beach.

The mooring balls allow many more boats to use an anchorage than if they all had their own anchor down. They are very popular in areas that have coral reefs too because anchoring at random destroys the coral, but the mooring balls are permanently screwed into the bottom of the sea allowing the reefs to continue to grow. Steve nudged the boat up to the ball and I reached down from the bow with the boat hook to grab the "pennant", a 5-10' line attached to the ball to which you tie your own line, and then cleat your line off. Alas, there was no pennant on this one, nor any of the ones I could see. So I pulled the huge ball up and out of the water with the boat hook and Steve leaned over and threaded our line through the eye on top of the ball. Whew, those things are heavy.....

Today we took the dinghy in to Moss Marine to visit looper friends Tom and Diann (boat Noah Genda). We enjoyed getting caught up on their cruising adventures since the last time we had seen them and looking at charts for the best route to the Keys. Steve and I walked to the center of town and hopped on the Beach Trolley for a round trip tour through Fort Myers Beach, Lovers Key, and Bonita Shores. It was a good way to get a quick look at the resorts, houses, beaches and bays in this popular area. During our dinghy ride back to the boat, Steve took us in for a close up look at the shrimp boat fleet.

Fort Myers Beach is a funky happenin' touristy kinda place with a little something for everyone so we expect to spend the next couple of days doing a little more exploring and beach walking.