Port Sanibel Marina on New Years Eve

Happy New Year to all of our readers. It has been great to read your comments and to hear form some of you by phone.

We are going to depart Port Sanibel Marina on Wednesday or Thursday (depending on weather & forecasts). We will be stopping in Naples, Everglade City and possibly Flamigo. I need to call Flamingo and find out about their water depths and if there is any shoaling in the channel on the way in. There is a nice marina and the Visitor Center for the Everglades National Park at Flamingo. It would be nice to spend a day or 2 there before moving on to Islamarada.

We have had a couple of cold nights here and the low tides have been pretty low with the full moon but the weather is on the rebound today.

I have a few pictures that will hopefully be of interest. The marina rents boats and they were flushing one of the outboards and there is a manatee in the picture with his snout up drinking the fresh water, look close next to the prop. You are not supposed to give the manatees fresh water but it happens inadvertantly. Later that day I was draining water from my cooler off the swim platform and the manatee was there again for the stream of fresh water. It did not last long and he has not been back again.

We also have a osprey nest at the south end of the marina but there is no sign of any young birds yet, just the mother and father. We also have a great number of pelicans. They stay around the marina because of the charter boat captains. The captains clean the catch for the customers and then throw the fish remains to the pelicans who fight over them.

We had some rain one afternoon and ended with a double rainbow which was pretty unusual.

We also had a gentleman launch what turned out to be a brand new HackerCraft at the marina earlier this week. I did not realize that HackerCraft is still in business of building boats. The boat in the picture is 30′ with a 496 ci engine and he took it out into San Carlos Bay for some testing. I think they may have it down here for the boat show in Miami in February. The boat was mohagany with 12 coats of varnish and $300,000.

Finally one of the great sunsets at the marina.