On Island Time: Kayaking the Caribbean

by Scott B. Williams

  After the incident off Round Island, I didn’t intend to let anything stop me this time. Perhaps it was because I was already far from home, and I could smell the salt of the Gulf and see the palm trees and circling gulls, but I had no doubts now that I was going places in my kayak.

  A month had passed since Ernest and I had paddled back to the mainland from Round Island. It was the month that I had planned to be working my way along the Gulf coast to reach this part of central Florida. Instead, it had been a month of making phone calls and then waiting for a new kayak to be built and delivered from British Colombia to Savanna, Georgia, where I had arranged to rendezvous with the builder to pick it up.

  Immediately after accepting the certainty that the plastic kayak in which I’d begun the journey was unfit for the task, I called John Dowd, a New Zealander famous among sea kayakers for his epic voyages and for the magazine, Sea Kayaker, of which he was then the editor. He was also the author of the definitive book on the techniques of long-distance kayak touring. I had met John earlier that same year at a sea kayaking symposium, where he had patiently answered my barrage of questions about the Caribbean kayak expedition he had done with three companions ten years before. If anyone knew expedition sea kayaking, and knew what kind of kayak I would need for my voyage, it was John Dowd.

  John understood my dilemma and promised to do all he could. He put me in touch with Mike Neckar, the designer and builder of Necky Kayaks, in British Colombia. Mike built the kayak that Ed Gillette paddled from California to Hawaii. He knew what I needed to make the trip I envisioned, and he said he could build me one of his Tesla designs in Kevlar - the toughest and lightest boatbuilding material available. The Tesla is a 17-foot kayak with a 24-inch beam, providing more interior volume and load carrying capability than most sea kayaks. Mike said he would build it extra-strong, laminated with epoxy resin, and fully equipped with bulkheads, hatches, and a foot-controlled rudder. He would do all this for only the cost of materials, which was about a third the retail price of the boat. I was elated at the prospect of getting a kayak of that quality at a price I could afford. The only catch was that I would have to pick it up in Savanna, Georgia, where Mike was going to personally deliver a dozen or so of his kayaks to a dealer. There would be a three-week wait while he built the boat and made the road trip from Canada.

  I studied my charts and the dates I had marked off on my carefully planned itinerary. It would be November before I could get underway again. If I resumed the trip at Round Island, cold fronts would overtake me before I could get to tropical latitudes. I decided to move my departure point farther south, to where I expected to be around the first of November anyway. I didn’t want to have to find room in the kayak for warm clothing. My oldest brother, Frank, lived in Apollo Beach, on Tampa Bay, and his waterfront home conveniently featured a dock in the backyard.

  When my kayak was ready, I arranged to have a friend drive me to Savanna to pick it up. When we got there, I was surprised at how beautiful it was with its sleek, sweeping curves and brilliant Gelcoat finish. The white hull was mated to a teal-green deck the color of tropical seawater. This boat was a sports car of sea kayaks compared to what I had been paddling. I felt a renewed sense of confidence that I could achieve my paddling goals with such an excellent craft. We loaded the kayak on the roof racks and drove to Tampa. I left the boat at Frank’s house, and then helped my friend drive her car back to Mississippi, where I quickly got my gear together and bought a Greyhound ticket to get back to Tampa. By the time all this was accomplished, November had arrived and my travel funds were reduced by $1500.

  Conditions were choppy on the wide-open waters of Tampa Bay, but the wind was from astern and I made good progress as I paralleled the eastern shoreline from about a mile out. Before dark I passed under the massive span of the Sunshine Skyway bridge that connects St. Petersburg with the east side of the bay, and paddled to a deserted-looking shore about a mile farther south. The coast here consists of mangrove swamp and small islands, a pocket of wild land in the midst of one of Florida’s largest urban areas. I landed on an island identified on my chart as Rattlesnake Key. There was a small beach among the mangroves, piled high with debris washed in by the sea and backed by a grove of cabbage palms and sea grape trees. Mosquitoes swarmed out to greet me as soon as I stepped onto shore, so I quickly changed from swimming shorts to jungle fatigues and a long-sleeved cotton shirt before pitching my tent.

  Driftwood was available, so rather than unpack the stove, I built a small fire and boiled some fresh squash, onions, and potatoes. A scorpion crawled out of the burning palm frond I used to start the fire. I didn’t know there were scorpions in Florida; seeing this one made me glad I had a tent to sleep in at night. I would be more careful in the future about where I put my hands and bare feet when gathering materials to build fires.

  I left Rattlesnake Key early the next morning and headed southwest across the mouth of Tampa Bay. Midway through the crossing, with the emptiness of the open Gulf to starboard, I intercepted a pod of perhaps twelve dolphins that changed course and fell in beside me. They stayed with me for almost a mile, leaping out of the water, racing ahead, and circling back to pass me again. I felt it was a good omen to be joined by these friends from the sea. They seemed to be encouraging me to keep going south, and seemed to know that they lifted my spirits and inspired me to paddle on. With this job done they disappeared to take care of whatever other business dolphins have to take care of on a sunny Thursday morning. I paddled on to Anna Maria Island, a barrier island on the south side of the entrance to the bay. When I reached its shelter I stayed on the inside and entered the Intracoastal Waterway.

  I would have the option of following this protected route down most of the west coast of Florida to the Keys. My kayak could handle the conditions of the outside coastal route, but staying in the waterway would allow me to travel in any weather and would offer more possibilities for finding campsites than on the developed beaches of the Gulf. In addition to the shoreline on each side of the waterway, there are numerous spoil islands created by channel dredging, and some of these might offer a secluded spot for an overnight bivouac.

  The disadvantage of traveling the Intracoastal Waterway is that it is a highway for powerboats of every description. In places where the channel was narrow, they were a threat to me, but I found that more often than not they slowed when they saw me, probably thinking their wake would capsize my frail-looking craft.

  In some areas waterfront homes lined the shore on both sides of the channel, but I was always able to find places to camp on the manmade islands. Each evening I waited until dark to land, then concealed my kayak in the mangroves and pitched my tent out of sight of the houses. I was not the only one to do this, as evidenced by the remains of campfires and small clearings in the woods on almost all the islands.

  Four days after leaving Tampa, I passed through Englewood, and camped on a Gulf front beach on the north end of Don Pedro Island. The scenery was changing somewhat as I moved south, with signs of the tropics becoming more evident. Though absent in the Tampa area, coconut palms were abundant here. In some places, the water under my hull was so clear that it felt as though my kayak was suspended in air above the extensive grass flats that covered the bottom. Mangrove forests dominated the shoreline in all but the developed areas. The insect populations I encountered each night as I made camp were getting more aggressive and more diverse the farther south I went. I kept them at bay with repellent and smoky fires, but usually retreated to the tent shortly after dark.

  One hundred miles south of my departure point I came upon an idyllic setting and for the first time felt the desire to spend more than one night in the same camp. Cayo Costa is a wilderness island, protected as a Florida state park and inaccessible except to those who visit in their own boats. I left the Intracoastal Waterway at Boca Grande Pass, at the north end of this island, and paddled a couple of miles down the pristine Gulf beaches of this subtropical key.

  I needed a c
ampsite where I could relax and not have to worry about moving out at daylight, so I pitched my tent among a grove of tall cabbage palms and slung my hammock for some daytime reading. I spent time walking the deserted beaches in the morning and evening and experimented with living off the land and sea.

  By digging in the sand just above the reach of the surf, I soon collected a cooking pot full of tiny clams, which I boiled in the shells until they opened and I could pick out the meat. They were tasty but too small to be worth the trouble unless I got really hungry. With my rod and reel, I tried fishing in a brackish lagoon behind the beach, but had no luck other than a close-up encounter with two bold alligators of 6 or 7 feet in length. I almost stepped on the first one before I noticed it stretched out on the sand near the lagoon. Both of them reluctantly retreated into the water, where they floated on the surface, eyeing me as if to say: “We dare you to come into our element.”

  Wild plant food was abundant on Cayo Costa. I sampled the seaside purslane, a low-growing herb that is good eaten raw, and using my machete, I cut a palm heart out of a small cabbage palm growing in the dense grove behind my camp. The palm heart was tender and delicious, if a bit difficult to get at. It was good to know this, since palms were so abundant here and I was sure they would be along most of my route. I intended to sample every tropical plant food I encountered on the trip, mainly as a way to extend my stay on remote islands with the limited amount of supplies I could carry in the kayak. I could also save money by supplementing my store-bought food with hunting, fishing, and gathering.

  Leaving Cayo Costa to go south, I left solitude behind and landed on an idyllic but ritzy beach at the South Seas Plantation Resort. This beach had the look to fit its name, with tall coconut palms leaning out over the shallows and shading the ship’s store and yacht basin that harbored dozens of gleaming motor yachts. I bought post cards in the store and sat down to write to folks back home while enjoying my first cold soda in days. A look at my charts told me that the next 20 or so miles were heavily developed. Sanibel Island and Ft. Myers Beach lay ahead, and it was already mid-afternoon when I was ready to get underway again. I resolved to paddle into the night – as long as it would take to get past the Ft. Myers area and find an unoccupied beach.

  After sunset it was easy to navigate on open water with only the scant starlight and distant city lights to guide me. The bow of my kayak sliced through big schools of fish that evidently thought it was some huge predator. Panicked fish leapt out of the water in all directions in an attempt to escape, one even slamming painfully into the side of my face with a stinging slap. All this splashing made me nervous as I scanned the dark waters for the dorsal fins of real predators.

  By midnight I was paddling past the condos and beach hotels of Ft. Myers Beach. I skirted the beach from just a few yards out, looking up at the line of buildings that were crammed into every available space. There were rows of wooden beach chairs between the buildings and the water, empty except for one, occupied by a passionate young couple thinking they were getting away with making love on a public beach, but oblivious to my silent passing on the dark waters just a stone’s throw away. Farther south, live music blared from a row of rowdy waterfront bars. By two in the morning, I was getting cold, sleepy and miserable. The magic of being out on the Gulf at night was wearing off, and I was ready to find a place to sleep. In the dark I couldn’t see a long sandbar that extended hundreds of feet in front of me, exposed by the low tide and blocking my route completely. Soon I found myself boxed-in and surrounded by sandbars that were covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of roosting sea gulls. The stench of accumulated guano was overwhelming. I was forced to laboriously drag the loaded kayak over the sandbars. My movements and muttered profanities woke the resting gulls and they took to the sky in every direction, filling the night with a din of panicked squawking and dropping of more stinking excrement. I’d had about all I could take by the time I was clear of the sandbars. It was 5:30 a.m. by this time. I found a narrow beach backed by woods, dragged the kayak ashore, and threw my sleeping bag on the sand.

  Sunlight in my eyes woke me at 7:00 a.m., and I looked around to see several people milling about looking for seashells. This beach was not as deserted as it had appeared in the dark. I quickly put away my sleeping bag and was preparing to leave when a man in uniform drove up in a jeep and told me that the beach was part of a state park.

  “Did you camp here last night?” he asked in an accusatory tone.

  I told him that I had paddled all night and merely stopped here to eat breakfast for a few minutes. The ranger looked around for evidence of a campfire, and when he found nothing he glanced at my kayak, noticing the bang-stick in the cockpit, which he told me was illegal in Florida state parks. I was expecting a citation or worse, but when I explained the nature of my trip his attitude changed and the conversation turned friendly. He understood my need for the bang-stick, but warned me to keep it well hidden when I reached Everglades National Park.

  Despite the lack of sleep, I put in a hard morning of traveling and reached the condominiums and resort hotels of Naples shortly after noon. Paddling a straight coastline like this far from land is relatively boring, but if the surf is heavy, it is necessary to stay well out to avoid the breakers. This day there was little if any surf, so I was able to cruise just a few yards from the crowded beaches. There was an endless display of bikini-clad sun worshippers here, and being so close in allowed me to have passing conversations with some and to wave at others while weaving between those who ventured out for a swim. I stopped often to swim myself, as the downside of a windless day was the suffocating heat.

  I found my next campsite in the early afternoon south of all the development of Naples. It was a mostly deserted area of Australian pine forest with a narrow beach facing the Gulf. A woman walking the beach told me that the land was private and that police patrolled this section of coast by boat and by air because it was a favored spot for drug runners trying to slip their cargo ashore. Following her advice, I hid my camp well in the shadows of the pines and camouflaged everything with brush. Sure enough, a patrol boat cruised slowly by an hour later, but the officer carefully studying the shoreline did not see me crouching next to my tent. It seemed that there was no way I could travel this coast without trespassing or breaking someone’s rules. It was inconvenient to have to hide everything and to not be able to openly build a campfire, but to get to where I was going, I had to travel through populated areas, and in those areas, this sort of guerilla camping was going to become a way of life. I looked forward to a brief respite from this when I reached Everglades National Park. Beach camping is legal in the park, so long as you have the necessary backcountry permits and camp in the designated wilderness campsites.

  Not being able to build a fire turned out to be especially inconvenient that evening when my thoughts turned to preparing dinner. I set up my multi-fuel backpacker stove and began pumping it to build pressure for burning. The seal on the pump failed, spraying white gas in my face and eyes. I used a gallon of my water supply flushing my eyes. The stove sputtered and flared up in huge flames when I attempted to light it again, and in a fit of rage I tossed it clear past the beach and into the waves of the Gulf. With no stove and no option to build a fire, I ate cold beans from a can for dinner.

  The next morning after leaving my wooded hideaway, I stopped on the beach at Marco Island to buy groceries. From the sea I had no way of knowing where the nearest supermarket was, and as it turned out I had landed miles south of the only one and ended up spending half the day walking there and back, carrying plastic bags heavy with groceries back to the kayak. On Marco Island the November sun beat down with summer-like intensity, making this re-supply effort more difficult than a half day of paddling. I carefully selected my groceries, knowing that Marco Island was my last chance to buy supplies before I reached the Everglades, where I would have more than 100 miles of wilderness coastline to traverse. I knew what to expect there from a weeklong trip two ye
ars before with Ernest. We had been traveling in an open canoe, so we avoided the coast and instead explored the mangrove swamps and the open savannas the Indians called Pa-hay-oh-kee – The River of Grass. Swarms of mosquitoes tormented us in the mangroves, so my intention this time was to skirt the edge and camp on the open beaches of the barrier islands. I would be more exposed if the weather should turn bad, but I hoped that the Gulf breezes would help keep the insects at bay. I could always change my mind if I needed to and take the alternate route of the Wilderness Waterway, a 100-mile marked water trail that leads to the southern tip of Florida by way of the swamps.

  I entered insect hell the same day I left Marco Island, when I set up camp on a deserted beach just east of Cape Romano. Clouds of vicious salt-marsh mosquitoes filled the air and forced me into my tent as soon as it was erected. In the morning I tried to cook pancakes for breakfast but mosquitoes flew into the batter by the dozens and clung to the protective head net I was wearing in such numbers that I could hardly see. I shoved my half-packed gear into the kayak and hastily paddled for open water, the only place I could get any relief. That day I worked my way south through the mangrove archipelago known as the Ten Thousand Islands and reached the national park boundary at Indian Key by nightfall. Though I had no permit, I camped there anyway. In the morning I would have to make a 6-mile side trip to Everglades City to visit the ranger station and get the necessary permits to continue south.

  After paddling to the ranger station the next day, I returned to Indian Key to camp there one more night before pushing on. I had permits for six nights in the park, with each campsite spaced close enough to reach in an easy day’s paddle.

  I would not be alone on Indian Key the second night. The park service had also issued a permit to a couple traveling in a canoe, or at least what had begun as a canoe. The man in the stern introduced himself as Pete Hill. He and his girlfriend, Mary Zinn, had driven from Ohio, and were planning an adventurous week’s vacation in the Everglades. Pete had lived in Micronesia for a time, and his stock fiberglass canoe was modified to emulate the native dugouts he’d seen there. Two slim bamboo outriggers protruded a few feet out from either side, and a wooden bowsprit extended the length of the 17-foot craft another three feet or so. A wooden mast was stepped amidships and stayed with rope. Twin leeboards clamped to the gunwales extended into the water to port and starboard. The sails were handmade, and in case the wind didn’t cooperate, there was an auxiliary outboard hanging off to one side of the stern on a makeshift bracket. A huge pile of gear rose above the gunwales, barely leaving room for Pete and Marty to sit.