WATERY WEDNESDAY, the best place in blogland to share your love of the water.
Taken from the back of the boat.
Just outside our Canal.
We were really enjoying the look of the River on this particular day, because the Caloosahatchie looked so much bluer than usual.
Sometimes it is more of a coffee-color. We haven't figured out exactly why.
FOR RUBY TUESDAY – more from our boat trip across the state. And to see more red pictures click and visit the links on Mary's great site.
It's not all fun and games out there on the rivers. Besides the bridge tenders and lockmasters and assorted people fishing and crabbing (OK, well, that IS fun), we also passed this boat, very slowly hauling an enormous load of pipes. The boat is called "Miss Susan" which seems too delicate a name for this workhorse of a boat.
This picture is our two friends passing this hard worker (just to show how large it is). That's the railing of our boat in the lower corner. We wondered whether that boat would be going through the locks and were glad we didn't have to share space with it there. 
This is the Leitner, another workboat of a different kind. It was tied up at one of the locks. This one belongs to the Army Corps of Engineers.
Here in Florida, as elsewhere, the Corps is a controversial entity. They are the ones responsible for how much water is let into or out of the rivers through the locks and no matter what they do it isn't right for someone. Of course they were also the force that built up Lake Okechobee in the first place, making it the second largest man-made Lake in the US. The Lake controls flooding but it's creation drained a good part of the Everglades in the process. Their Corps was created to build — that was its mission and it didn't used to matter if nature was destroyed in the process. Now there are some restoration activities going on, but the Lake will remain and we enjoyed our boat trip on it. So, I guess like most Floridians and people everywhere, we have mixed feelings.
LINKING TO 'SIGNS SIGNS' hosted by Lesley. This is a continuation of this post about taking our boat through five river locks.
Some signs just spoil all your fun…..
….. because really, if it hadn't told me not to, I would have jumped off the boat, shinnied up one of the lines and jumped between boats into this inviting water:
Yeah, right!!
LINKING TO THAT'S MY WORLD AND WATERY WEDNESDAY.
Going through river locks was the most adventurous part of our cross-Florida boat trip last week.
There are three locks to go through on the Caloosahatchie and two on the St Lucie. The locks control the depth of the Lake and allow water to flow into the two rivers. These are our friends' two boats waiting for the lock to open. Our boat is very similar to the one in front.
The boater radios the dockmaster who tells you which side — port or starboard — you will tie up to. Below are some people watching us from above as we lock up. You can see the lines along the walls.
All five of these locks have lines hanging down to grab hold of. Our friends said that on the Great Lakes, where they boat in the summer, you have to bring your own.
It can be a little bit scary to bring the boat alongside the wall, especially if the wind is blowing and you have been assigned the side where the wind is blowing the "wrong way". Usually we both just stand and hold on to a line in the front and back (fore and aft) of the boat. But a couple of times the wind was blowing fairly hard and the lockmaster said "someone" had to climb out on the bow and cleat the line (wrap the line around a cleat and take in or let out the slack). The picture above is the "someone" who did that on our boat. (I was just hoping that it wasn't the last picture I ever took of Bill.)
Our boat does not have a walkaround on the outside, so this was not an easy thing at all when next to the lock wall. (The picture's not great because I was holding on to the other line with one shaky hand while I took it with the other, but in front you can also see the water gushing in.)
The only other thing we had to worry about was that a couple of the locks are on an every-other hour schedule. It's a way to control the flow of water and limit the number of times it opens. Through careful planning, we got to those locks in good time — not too early, but we weren't worried about being late either.
The only unplanned slowdown we had was at this railroad bridge just out of Stewart on our way back.
Trains always have the right-of-way and we had to wait for two of them to go by before the bridge opened. (The blue boat is just another of the several that were milling around waiting.)
Just got back from a 5 day, 250-mile boat trip and here are a few postcards we forgot to send.
These are morning shots from Loggerhead Marina at Stewart, where we stayed two nights. Stewart is on the Atlantic Coast side of Florida, so we boated from Gulf to Ocean — along the edge of huge Lake Okechobee. It was a fine adventure.
We took the laptop with us, but it wasn't working very well. If that had happened when we were in the RV, it would have felt as if I were missing my right arm — but in the boat, I just didn't really care. Being out in the fresh air all day, combined with the gentle rocking motion of the boat when we turned in for the evening after dinner — and beach brain prevailed.
A wonderful trip — but It's good to be back.
Lesley, whose main blog is called 'Southern Ontario Discovered', hosts 'SIGNS SIGNS' every Thursday. Join in if you have sign pictures in your files – or just go look at the links. It's another way to picture the world.
This guy is supposed to represent Ponce de Leon, who searched for the Fountain of Youth and found Florida instead. We saw this in St Augustine at some kind of tourist trap that we just drove by.
We too have searched for the Fountain of Youth.
In fact, in addition to staying in St Augustine, we've stayed right at the Fountain of Youth in California.
Neither of these places made us any younger, but we had a great time at both!
Here is a link to our early post about the other Fountain of Youth. It's close to Salvation Mountain, which we've posted about a couple of times.
SHARING THIS POST WITH SKYWATCH FRIDAY and WEEKEND REFLECTIONS, both great places to spend some weekend hours.
Here are some various shades of our beautiful Florida skies filtered through the trees.
Of course, it's even better when the reflection of the sky is even bluer than the original.
FOR SIGNS SIGNS, LESLEY'S THURSDAY MEME
Sometimes, a sign can be very useful in explaining something you would never have been able to figure out without reading it.
This was not one of those times.
(We saw this house on Sullivan Street in Punta Gorda, FL. — it was a Sunday and there was nobody around to ask for further information.)
SHARED WITH MELLOW YELLOW MONDAY . Visit for your weekly dose of sunshine!
Fruit and flower pictures taken on a tour of Echo Farm last week. Click on the link to read our post about this farm. (We toured it last year later in the Spring. There were more things blooming this time.)
Echo Farm is definitely not a show garden — the point of it is to teach people to garden in a variety of climates. I wrote about the work it does last year, so this time I just wanted to post some pretty pictures.
FOR SKYWATCH FRIDAY. if you love the sky (and who doesn't) go there and click on some of the links.
Just another Florida Winter evening.
