April 9, 2025

Weather is much better, a beautiful sunny day and we continue east on the Caloosahatchee River.  We need to pass through several locks.

The water difference from one side to the other is much smaller than previous locks. It appears they are all 6 feet or less. However, the lock chamber is much smaller so the water entering creates more turmoil. Think whirlpool! The ropes are hanging on the lock walls.  Boats motor up, hook one of the ropes and wrap it around a boat cleat in an “S” formation at both the bow and stern. (MAB gets more practice hooking! LOL) Then hang on! Commercial traffic does not utilize these locks like they do on the Tenn-Tom waterway, so we encounter few wait times and were the only boat going through each lock. On the downside, two of the locks have only one gate working so it is a very narrow passage to exit. Boat Captain was very tentative on exit so the Admiral was posted midship with the pole to push off the gate in case we are too close. (And more pole work – LOLOL) All went well, no bumps or scrapes! We are now on the Caloosahatchee Canal.

Suddenly there are alligators, lots of them.

The route we took today from Ft Myers to Clewiston is shown here in this photo along with our speed changes and time of day.

There are many reasons to adjust speed: No Wake zones, locks, bridges, passing other vessels. 

Clewiston is the home of Roland Martin Marina and our next stop. I have no idea who Roland Martin is but my brother keeps asking me if I met him. A quick google search and I learn he is a professional sport fisherman. He still works as a guide and a group of two can spend the day fishing with him for $1500. Seems pretty reasonable to spend the day with a legend. Sadly, my path never crossed with his even though he was there while we were.

A beautiful marina cat is in charge of mouse population and clearly is in charge.

This marina is quite impressive and includes two on site restaurants. One provides breakfast from 5:30 – 10am. This is a favorite of those headed out to fish for the day. I felt out of place without fishing gear on and not talking about where or what was the fishing plan. The other restaurant provided lunch, dinner and evening entertainment. It was clearly the hot spot in town with karaoke, DJs and/or live band. Our boat was docked right next to this restaurant with only a narrow dock separating us. We assumed a good time was had by all but it was confirmed early the next morning when Alan went to use the facilities. He saw a rhinestone studded leather bustier laying in the parking lot. I keep telling him he HAS to take photos to add to our BLOG or else we are going to question what he thinks he saw!! 

We are waiting for a weather window. I would never have guessed a lake in the middle of Florida would have such a complicated weather system.

The photo included here is a screenshot from the PredictWind app. All around Lake Okeechobee is a calm 5mph wind as indicated in blue.  Over Lake O it is 10-15mph as indicated by green to yellow. Also, Lake O has some very shallow areas and one needs to be very careful remain in the dredged channel to not “touch” bottom. Our boat has a 3.5 draft (amount of boat protruding down into the water) which is modest for her length. Many Loopers have boats with 5 ft draft or more. You certainly do not want to have high winds to deal with when trying to remain in a narrow channel.