Stuart to Olga (almost Ft. Myers) FL

This is the first time I have been able to get to the Blog since we left Stuart.  Stuart is the start of the trip across the state to Ft. Myers Beach where I am leaving the boat for the holidays.  We will be flying home on Thursday the 18th.  For this leg of our adventure we are taking the Okeechobee Waterway, which like the ICW, a series of rivers and canals with the gigantic Lake Okeechobee thrown in.  The trip across includes 5 locks, two up to the lake and three down to the Gulf.  Our first stop was Saturday night at the Indian Town Marina.  They hosted a cook out that night which gave us an opportunity to meet some fellow travelers.  The marina has this huge field filled with boats.  People leave their boats here in the spring and come back in the early winter to launch them to go cruising.  the opposite of what we do up north.   The above picture is of us in the first lock, we were the only boat in the lock.  we were lifted 13 feet.

The captain is getting the boat ready to sail across the lake, about 25 miles to the other side.

We had been looking for alligators since the Alligator river in North Carolina.  We finally found them, a bunch of them along the canal from Clewiston to Moore Haven.

We saw two air boats along the Caloosahatchee Canal.  Today we negotiated two locks, one swing bridge and two Draw bridges.  Tomorrow we will have a short day, we are only about 30 miles from Ft. Myers Beach.

Greg