Taking Tamure to Naples, FL

January 1, 2016

Today we helped our friends, Jim and Ann Vandiver, move their 58 ft Bertram to Naples, FL.  They are having work done to their Nautical Structures platform lift,  and there is a manufacturer authorized service guy there.  Rob had been looking at passageweather.com for Gulf wave height predictions, and this seemed like the best day for small waves on the bow going south.

This is an example of a Passageweather.com wave height forecast image.  We have to subtract 5 hours from the UTC time at the top right corner for the time in the Eastern time zone, so this forecast is for 1 pm EST.

Jim had pulled the boat over to the fuel dock the day before to get fueled up so that we could leave at first light.  It was the first time he had piloted the boat since the trip over from Ft Lauderdale, and he did a great job maneuvering Tamure out of her slip.  Rob and I figured that the fairway between D and E docks is probably 75 ft.  Since Tamure is probably about 63 ft long with the current platform on the back, he really didn’t have a whole lot of room to spare to get her turned once the back cleared the slip pilings.

The night before we left, Rob and Jim also went over how to program the planned route into the Garmin GPS/chartplotter.  Doing this not only allows you to review navigational features on the route but also gives you a route line to follow while cruising.  For the landlubbers out there who are reading this blog, chartplotters don’t work exactly like land-based GPS programs.  In many of them, you can’t just pick a place to go and have the plotter figure your route.  With the Garmin 7610XSB, unless we haven’t figured things out right, we have to manually plot our course, selecting waypoints at which to turn.  We do have an iPod app called Navionics that will figure the route for you, so we usually have both the Garmin and the iPod at the helm while we are cruising.  Interestingly to us, the Garmin program is actually less precise in figuring our exact location than the Navionics app most times, and at times it looks like the boat is running over land on the display screen.  Rob says this might improve if we pay Garmin for the maps rather than just using the free version that comes with the unit, but since you’re only supposed to use the programs as a guide really, it’s not a big issue.

The trip to Naples would only be about 50 miles or so, but we left at around 7 a.m. so that we would have the most daylight time just in case we had to go slower than anticipated.  We hoped to cruise at 8-10 mph, but if we only averaged 6 mph, it could take up to 9 hrs to go 50 miles.

Parasailing on the Gulf

As it turned out, we had a near perfect cruising day, sunny with temperatures in the low 80’s, little wind, and less than 1 ft waves on the bow in the Gulf.  The only thing that made the cruising less than perfect was dodging crab pots from time to time.  We cruised right around the 3 mile line in the Gulf, so if we had gone out a little further, we probably could have avoided the crab pots altogether.  We really only went through a few spots where there were multiple lines of pots, so it wasn’t too bad.

Cruising the Gulf

View of the shore from 3 miles out

We made good time on the Caloosahatchie River to the Gulf, so we slowed our cruising speed down once we were on the Gulf.   We wanted to get to the Isle of Capri Marina sometime between 4-5 p.m., because high tide was to be around 6:30p.m. and the approach to the marina could be too shallow for Tamure’s draft otherwise.

Despite slowing down, we arrived at the marina’s approach around 3 p.m.  There were several restaurant/bars with dockage nearby, so Rob started calling them to see if they had space for us to dock.  To me, it didn’t look like the 2 closest places could possibly accommodate a 58 ft boat, but I was glad to be wrong about both.  The Snook Inn and Restaurant had dockage with enough space and draft, but there was already a boat docked there.  The Pelican Pier had an inside slip available, so we cruised over to it, and Jim maneuvered Tamure into the tight space like a champ.  We enjoyed great handmade burgers which rank up there with the best we’ve had, as well as some beverages, to pass the time until we could make our way to the marina.

Enjoying food and drink at Pelican Pier

Pelican Pier is very dog friendly

The approach wasn’t as shallow as we had feared, but we kept to the port bank as we had been instructed to do by the dockmaster.  Once we got to the marina, we had to wait a short time for a slip to open up, because we had to dock in a slip which was also used by patrons of the dockside Restaurant.  Tamure’s slip for the next month would be available tomorrow, so Jim and Ann would move it over then.  I was glad that Rob and I weren’t staying the night, because no sooner had we docked when the no-seeums started biting!  Ann had some Skin So Soft lotion which helped, but since we hadn’t really seen many bugs at Ft Myers Yacht Basin, she was also glad that they would be taking Tamure back there once the work was done.

Jim and Rob had brought Jim and Ann’s car to the marina a couple of days earlier, so Jim drove us home to Lorelei IV.  Even though they have a nice boat and the trip was great, it sure was good to get home!