Cruise 4 - 2/23/13 -- 3/3/13

When we got back to the boat the new Seventh Sun III sign is on the stern but since the dinghy's bottom is what you see and they couldn't get the new name sign to stick to that, we still say "Pointless" to most.  We have been waiting on the new transmission to come in.  We thought that there might be issues with the transmission during sea trial but .....long story.  The work (transmission and fuel lines) was finished Friday night and we took off on Saturday morning.  Our plan was to get up to St. Petersburg/Tampa but we decided we didn't have the time to do that comfortably.  We stopped in Venice the first night at Crow's Nest, walked the 1.8 mile to dinner in town and took a little golf cart shuttle back. You can see our little Mainship with a big brother hovering on a very foggy morning in Venice.

Left there the next morning for Sarasota and Marina Jacks.  This is a great location....we listened to music at night and were able to walk to restaurants and Whole Foods !  We had visitors....Bryant, Hollenbachers and Shoups for lunch.  Don and Marilyn gave us a tour of their boat before taking back off to their condo a few miles down the ICW.








We visited St. Armand's one evening to walk and have dinner and visited the Ringling Museum the next day....the house, museums, grounds and the interesting history of the Ringlings makes this a must see.

The next morning we took off at 7:00am because we were going to try to get to Tween Waters early enough to enjoy....which we did.  Almost 60 miles is a long way in this boat.  We are learning that when averaging 8 mph travel takes a lot longer.  We decided it didn't matter how fast your boat can run, there are so many areas where you need to go slowly/little wake that 8mp is about what we are going to average.  Just another new idea to put into our brains.  The other is "channels".  That is what we do...watch for the channel markers, stay in the channel !  We never had to do that much in the NW waters.  Two new constants for us...stay in the correct channel and go slow all of the time.
Tween Waters is cute and laid-back with two restaurants, pool etc.  A mile walk for a late lunch and then back along the beach where the red tide has brought a lot of dead fish up on the beach along with a cough in my throat.  We took our new bikes for their inaugural ride and came back in one piece.  We took the dinghy to the Green Flash restaurant for dinner and back to Tween Waters for the crab races at 9:00.  We rode the bikes again up to the little town in Captiva for breakfast.
We went back to Ft. Myers and Legacy Harbor the next day to finish up any necessary chores.  We finally visited the Edison and Ford Winter Home Museum and later that night had dinner with Denise and Joanne, our next door neighbor boaters from Charleston.
When we come back in March we plan on provisioning and then hope to take off the next day.  We will be heading across the Okeechobee and end that leg at St. Augustine.
Oh, Ken was able to sand "Pointless" off of the bottom of the dinghy!!!