Our boat club decided to take a trip to Clewiston.  Clewiston is located in the middle of the state by Lake Okeechobee, which is a fresh water lake.  We’ll have to travel thru 4 locks and 2 bridges that will have to lift for us for a total of 75 miles, one way.

We left Smokie home this time

Bye Bye Smokie

because there are a lot of alligators where we are going.  We wouldn’t want the little fella to get eaten :(.  Hopefully we’ll eventually get him on the boat to see how he does.

We started our trip with 10 boats.  We don’t travel all together as everyone travels at different speeds.  A few of us left a day early, some to go right to the Roland Martin Marina, we on the other hand were planning on checking out  the town of Moore Haven which was right on the way.

Of the 10 boats that started out, 2 of them had to turn around because of engine troubles.   That is one of the main topics at all our gatherings.  Boat issues….what broke when, how it broke, how they ran aground, how much things costs.  Wowzer!  Either these are the most unluckiest people or they just use their boat so much that things break.

We left Tuesday around 8:30 A.M.  We had a lovely day to start out

Beautiful day on the Caloosahatchee River

This was one of our two bridges

OPEN Sezme!

We left early in the day so we could do our usual meandering speed.  We also stopped for gas.  $66.40 to fill this tank :).  Gotta love the smaller tank.

A couple of our fellow boaters caught up to us at the 2nd bridge.

Quest on the left, Tropical High on the right

Tropical High really needed to have the bridge raised, we might have been able to eek by and not leave too much fiberglass on the bottom of the bridge.  After we were thru the bridge, they took off.  They asked us what a good traveling speed was for us, 20 or 25 MPH.  Gary laughed and said we travel at 18 MPH.  Needless to say they left us in the dust :).

As we continued our meanderings, (we like to really travel at 8 MPH, that way you can see such interesting stuff ;)) we saw this really big boat down one of the canals

Big but not loved anymore

Here is another example of a boat someone doesn’t love anymore.  Why don’t they just sell it before it becomes a derelict?  Poor boat.

Then we saw cows!  Really!  We saw cows drinking out of the river

Moooo

Lets hope there aren’t any hungry alligators close by or he’ll be someone’s lunch.

We had to travel thru 2 locks today.  They didn’t raise us too far but the way they raised the water in the lock was they opened the front door a crack and let the water pour in.  The first lock we only had to be raised 2 feet so it was no big deal, the second lock they raised us about 8 feet.  Holly Tamolly Andy!  The water came pouring in.  We were kind of close to the front door and we were pushed around quite a bit by the water flow.  That wasn’t too much fun.  I guess we’re out of practice.

We finally arrived at our destination, River House Marina.  Now this place is under new owners so I won’t bash it too badly because they are working to fix it up.  But….

Docks need a little work

Although they had some docks that had just rebuilt, the dock they put us at had 1/2 of it roped off with yellow caution tape and the part we tied to didn’t look too good either.  But as with any dock, you have to be careful where and how you walk.  Ya never know….

They had 1 uni-sex bathroom

Bath House

And I am not sure what this will be but if you want internet, you had to sit on the porch

House?

But they did have this really cool cactus

See the truck it hides?

The main problem with this place was, we were getting ash on the boat, the dock and the grass from the sugar cane fields.  Apparently, as part of the process to harvest the sugar cane, they burn the leaves off so all you have left is the cane.  Well that makes for a messy boat.  I had to use the head and so I walked over the grass/mud to get to the one uni-sex bathroom.  By the time I got back to the boat my shoes where filthy.  And because the docks were so high, I had to get on the front of the boat.  I ended up traipsed mud and ash all over the boat.  Oh Oh!  Hopefully Gary won’t keel haul me.

Clean Boat

Luckily it just washed off.

We did go out to eat for dinner that night.  We found Moore Haven to be a poor town as was evident by the buildings we passed 

Apparently a by-pass was built and killed the town.  We did have a good dinner at a place called Cafe 27 that used to be an old gas station.  Good food and good service.  On the way back from dinner we saw this really tall Norfork Pine

Tall Boy!

When we arrived back at the boat, we received a text from one of the people who had gone ahead of us.  One of the women had fallen on the dock and was taken away in an ambulance.  Crap!  That is 3 of the 10 down.  We’ll have to get that scoop when we arrive tomorrow.  So off to bed we went to get good nights sleep, which we did when the trains weren’t blowing their horns and the dogs across the river weren’t barking their fool heads off.  We were off early the next morning to finish our trip to our final destination.