Ah, sailors, whatcha gonna do with 'em?
Today, we got lazy and slept in before biking off to breakfast. realizing we weren't going to ride bikes 4 miles each way on narrow sidewalks alongside busy Highway 41, we grabbed a cab and went out north of town to the Ringling compound. This is a fabulous asset willed to the state of Florida by John Ringling of Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus fame.
On the estate are the wonderful Ringling Museum of Art, the Ringling mansion Ca d'Zan, the circus museum, and a miraculous model circus resulting from fifty years of effort by a modeler.
Dinner at a local seafood restaurant was followed by a return to the boat ("bak sheep" as we used to say to the cabbies in the Orient back in the day).
We will get underway at about 0700 tomorrow in an effort to get to Fort Myers before 1900 tomorrow night. Fort Myers is about 90 nautical miles distant. Doing the math at a guestimated average speed of 7 knots through all the bridges and slow speed zones means almost 13 hours underway. If conditions warrant (and i think they will), we will cut out of the Intracoastal Waterway at venice, 14 NM distant, and run 27 NM down the coast to the next entrance at Boca Grande. This move bypasses a lot of slow zones and shallow water and leaves us 34 miles to go to get to Legacy Marina in downtown Fort Myers. Our average speed my be closer to 8 knots going this way. We'll never be out of sight of land.
We'll see how it all shakes out and report later.
