Day 188: Monday, March 11, 2013

Port to Port: La Belle, Florida to Belle Glade, Florida

Underway: 9:00 am      Motor Off: 7:20 pm      Miles Traveled: 50     Stayed At: Free Dock

First Things First: First time seeing alligators from the boat (after 15+ hours on the river); first time seeing sugar cane burns.

Mile 103 to Mile 65 and Mile 75 to Mile 63: After a late start waiting until the first bridge opening (they wait until after rush hour), we started what turned out to be a really long day. We had originally planned to stop in Clewiston but the weather was perfect for travel and a strong front is moving in that is going to stir up Lake Okeechobee making it difficult to navigate on Tuesday afternoon. And Wednesday. And maybe Thursday. So we just kept going. And going. And going. We were aiming for a little cove where we could anchor but found a nice new T-dock at a boat landing that had our name on it. The large parking lot was empty and no signs said we couldn’t stay. So we stayed.

It was a long day but the scenery was ever changing – at least on one side of the canal. The other side of the canal was a tall levee with random big, long piles of rocks along the canal. We couldn’t see anything on the other side but there may be some large-scale plantations over there – and roads of some kind. There were lots of birds along the natural side of the canal…and alligators. It took until almost sunset before we saw our first alligators from the boat. We even saw a couple big ones swimming along the shore (only 30’ from Aurora). What a rush. They look a lot more menacing when you are that close to the water.

By going so far today, we will only have 24 miles to go early tomorrow morning (with 15 miles of that out in the open along the east shore of Lake Okeechobee) which we are hoping to finish before noon to avoid any rain and big waves.

After we got tied up to our nice new floating dock, the sun was setting and we were exhausted. I decided to see what was on the other side of the levee and walked up the path and over the hill to look (the levee is about 70’ tall here). Civilization, sort of. There was a nice motorhome campground spread out at the bottom of the hill and a highway off in the distance. If I squinted I could see the tell-tale sign of some kind of gas station (I hoped). To be sure, I checked Google Maps on my phone and sure enough there was a gas station 1 mile away. I decided to fill up our empty container just in case we couldn’t find any later. The walk was much better than expected – normally I’m walking right next to traffic, in the gravel or weeds, to get to a gas station. Here, there was a nice, wide concrete sidewalk the whole way along the highway. Lucky since it was pitch dark by this time. I returned to the boat a little while later with enough gas to get us to the Atlantic Ocean and a pint of vanilla ice cream as a treat (we have some older strawberries we need to use up so we don’t waste them). We slept soundly.

In Passing: Hogpen Gully, Long Hammock Creek, Glade Land, Lake Hicpochee, Moore Haven, Grambling Plantation, Observation Island, Clewiston, Little Bare Beach, Halifax Bank