From Ft. Myers to Titusville

There is only one word to describe it - grueling! We left Ft. Myers at 5:30 A.M. and  motored up the River - the Nina ahead of us (above) - until 11:30 P.M., when we tied up to a railroad swing-bridge entrance. It would not open again until 6:00 A.M. the next morning. Our bow (where I sleep) was not more than 15' from the tracks, and the trains sounded as if they were going through the boat. When the bridge tender came in that morning he was more than a little surprised (and annoyed - our captain promised not to do it again) to find two ships clogging up the entrance.
We left at 6:00 A.M. and arrived in Titusville at 2:30 A.M. the next day. When the ships are traveling, the four crew (we were two crew short) spend two hours on watch, then two hours off, around the clock. We were up this morning at 6:00 A.M. and spent until nearly dark getting the boat ready for opening to visitors tomorrow. It took that long because we had had to remove so much rigging from the mast tops to clear the bridges on the way from Ft. Myers.

The captain has rigged up a neat system for steering the boat. Since it is tiller steered, and the tiller is under the poop deck, he set up a pully and rope system whereby we can steer from up on the poop deck by  moving the rope back and forth to turn the tiller. Pretty neat, but not easy. We steer for one hour of our two hour watch, and the other hour, if it is dark, shining a 15,000,000 candle power search light to illuminate the river edges, or find the channel markers. (I don't know who that old man is.)

It daylight it is not difficult, but at night it is a different matter.

This is one of the five locks we passed through crossing from Ft. Myers to Jupiter Inlet (east coast of Florida) on the Okeechobee waterway.

The Everglades is a pretty desolate looking place alongside the waterway.

Lake Okeechobee does not seem so large on the charts, but you cannot see from one side to the other. I did not get a distance or time-for-crossing measurment, but it is huge. And the wind blew about 20 knots from the east from the time we left Ft. Myers until this evening. Calming now.

The captain says he wants us up and ready by 6:30 in the morning, so......