A Spectacle Seen, Another Not Seen

Fort Meyers Beach
No LL

Yesterday, as we sailed down the river, we saw something we thought was a bait ball. A bait ball is a densely packed school of small fish. They are hunted by predators and sometimes driven up to the surface. In that case, the sea birds get involved as they too start eating the fish. What we actually saw was an area of agitated water and a flock of over excited sea gulls attacking the water.

When we got close we saw that this wasn't a bait ball. The fish were large. Very large. 60-100 cm long fish. The gulls were excited by of course they couldn't pick up any fish that large.

We scrambled to get out a fishing pole and a lure. We figured that no matter how unlucky we are as fishermen, we could hardly miss catching on of those fish if we threw a hook in to the middle of that ball. We were too slow. Before we had the pole out on deck, the ball dispersed and disappeared. Too bad for us.

Last week, our plan was to continue north from Fort Meyers Beach to visit Caya Costa, Punta Gorda, and Tampa Bay. We discarded that plan in favor of the trip up the Caloosahatchee River. Today, I bought a newspaper and learned that if we had gone to Tampa that we would have been right in the middle of Super Bowl Hysteria next Sunday. OMG, that would have been terrible from our point of view. We like to avoid crowds. We never go to the big boat shows. A Super Bowl brings the biggest crowd
of all. In this case, there will be a big spectacle that we will not see, and we're glad.