"GUY TIME" IN THE 10,000 ISLANDS

For the week of February 22-March 1, 2010, Admiral Nancy decided that she needed a little break from her arduous duties, such as keeping the Captain alive, so she jumped ship at Everglades City and went to Spring’s in Ft. Lauderdale. She had promised to paint the inside of their house, for fun . . . no, seriously, for fun. Old college buddy, John Heerwald (in the serious fishing hat), jointed Jim for a little beer drinking & fishing expedition northward into the 10,000 Islands for the week.

Shuttling John-to and Nancy-from Summer Breeze and Everglades City started out pretty exciting in that the timing was such that we were getting hit by another lousy cold front and high winds during the exchange. The motorboat that was hired for the crew switch (because our tiny dink was too small)ran out of gas about 100 yards short of our boat on its five-mile trip out and came close to floundering & swamping on the mangroves. Fortunately, Capt Jim came to the rescue in our cute little inflatable and towed them the rest of the way. It all worked out fine after a couple of hours, and the guy time and fishing began as planned . . . and, oh, did I mention beer drinking?

Except for one gale that we hid out from, back up in the mangroves behind Panther Key, the weather was cooperative and we got in a lot of great “fishing”, but just a minimum of “catching”. The freezing cold that we’ve experience this winter really gave the fish lockjaw. We did manage to have sea trout tacos a couple of times however . . . oh, yeah, and some beer drinking, too, in case I forgot to mention that.

After anchoring out for a night near Dismal Key on the 28th, we headed for the Calusa Island Marina on Goodland Key near Marco Island and made the crew switch back with Admiral Nancy on March 1. She was literally covered with paint from her jaunt ashore . . . hence the old saying “paint the town”.