A History of The Mary Mary – Part 2 – Fort Meyers, Florida – Moore Haven, Florida (2006)

Well, sorry about that readers; sort of left you hanging there, didn’t I?

When I got back to the boat, as I was saying, I received a phone call from Bruce (my first mate for the next leg of the journey). He had arrived late at the airport and there was a huge line-up to get through security and he didn’t think he could get through in time to make his flight.

My heart sank. If he didn’t come it would be virtually impossible for me to continue on. My skills (as you will soon see) were minimal and another hand was a must. He said he would call me back in a bit. I decided to do a bit of engine maintenance while I waited and ran over my possible options as I replaced some corrupted zincs. I could try to get someone else from Toronto but on short notice and with air flights involved, that wouldn’t happen any time soon. I could go back to the crab shack and get some likely looking candidate to accompany me by buying him copious drinks and them smacking him the head with a belaying pin, like in the old days. I reasoned that people in Florida were probably used to being shanghaied periodically, so maybe I’d get away with it. But how to keep him on board when he came to? No, that wasn't the answer.

The phone rang and it was Bruce. Some airport people had come along asking if anyone was close to departure time and they escorted Bruce to the plane. He was going to make it! 

Mister Bruce

A few hours later he emerged from a taxi and came aboard. Now we were getting somewhere. I gave him the tour and explained what he would need to do as temporary first mate. Handle the lines when docking, putting out fenders and the like. I told him about the safety concerns not the least of which was my erratic command. I told him he would almost certainly hurt his head at some point. He seemed okay with that.

There was still plenty of daylight left and we decided to make the most of it and try to make the town of Alva a few miles up the Caloosahatchee River. We would dock there for the night and then proceed to take the cross-Florida route through Lake Okeechobee. This would involve several locks, which until now I had no notion of. Soon I would know more than I wanted to…

We arrived at the first lock and waited as the lock emptied from the other direction and the doors swung open to admit us. There was a small boat ahead of us so I waved them in. To this point most of my steering operation in close quarters involved using the manoeuver of putting one engine in forward and one in reverse and pivoting to the appropriate angle and then forwarding in; very little use of the wheel. This was wrong. I found out just how wrong when I tried to do this into the lock against the turbulence of the outgoing water. We started in all right but then the flow caught the bow and pushed us in on the gates. We grazed the starboard gate and bounced into the lock, hard against the wall. Thankfully, we were well-fendered. 

Ortona Lock - One of the rites of passage

Now if you have ever been in a Florida lock you will know that they are controlled and ruled over by ex-navy chiefs and marines now working for the Army Corps of Engineers. These guys are older, tough, have seen everything and don’t like people colliding with their gates. The public address system crackled into life and with ear-splitting echo reverberating off the stone walls of the lock, the word came down from above. “What the hell do you think you’re doing to my gates? Those gates are new, godamn it!” We apologized profusely. When the lock had done its business, the gates at the other end opened slowly. There was little turbulence this time as it was all up-stream. But I couldn’t get the boat off the wall. Mister Hunter tried with all his might to push us off but there was still turbulence in the lock that was pushing us up against the wall. I looked up and could see the little sergeant staring down at me. Glowering is probably a better word. 

A typical navy lock-master :-)

With a grating that made my teeth go on edge, the bow started to move out and the stern rail came into contact with the cement wall of the lock. More horror... Finally we were out of the lock and underway and I found that I was now drenched in sweat. Bruce, somewhat pale, arrived on the bridge. I imagine his life was just finishing up passing before his eyes. We didn’t say much for a while.

Turbulence in an Okeechobee lock

My estimation of the time and distance was off and it was dark by the time we hit Alva. The town, what we could see of it, seemed to be deserted and we hovered there out in the middle of the channel, cloaked in the chill night air and the eerie quiet, wondering what to do. A ground fog was starting to roll in. I spotted a dock belonging to a motel of some sort and a sign that said you could stay there and to check in with the motel office. I pulled us in and Mister Hunter jumped off and made fast the lines. We walked up to the darkened motel that was situated just off a highway by the bridge that we had seen as we drifted in the river. The office was locked up for the night. A small sign said that for night service you should go round the back to the owner’s apartment there. We did that. The door to the back residence was wide open except for the screen door. Inside we could see dimly into an unlighted living room, dark but for the glow of a television set that was on with the volume up. We knocked… nothing. We called inside… no response. We went back to the boat and decided we’d go up in the morning and pay before we left. 

Alva, Florida. The motel is by the small, wooden dock.

The next day we awoke very early, about 6:30 am. I had spent a restless night, reliving the lockage and fretting about what I would do at the next one. And after that 6 more! Shivering in the morning air, I walked back up to the motel. The office was still closed and the door at the back was still open and the TV set was still on. This was all getting a bit too odd so I went back to the boat; we started up the engines and moved off. Well, a free night is a free night.

Lock 2, Moore Haven. We headed out and approached the second lock. I was mighty nervous about this and was made more so by the fact that a catamaran was going to join us in the lock. When the gates opened up I motored in and was amazed that I managed to get us on to the wall with little fuss. But that celebration was short lived. After the ride up the lock, the gates opened and the lock became a seething mass of death water. I tried to get the boat to behave but she would have none of it. The stern swung out until we were sitting in the lock sideways with only a few feet of water between us and the wall at both ends. I tried to coral the beast but she started drifting over towards the small catamaran. As I looked down from the bridge I saw a wide-eyed couple aboard their life’s dream staring back at me, their mouths agape, as the twelve-ton Mary Mary bore down on them. 

A catamaran similar to the one we terrorized

“Use your wheel more!!” came the outraged and inevitable command from the PA. I spun it hard to port and gave it some throttle and she started to respond, but now we were coming dangerously close to the wall again. Bruce tried to push off with a pole but the pulpit hit the side of the lock. With a weary groan it started to buckle upwards and back. I felt a little sick. I had a vision of the steel rail splitting under the pressure and going through Bruce like a shark spear.

I eased off the throttle, spun the wheel hard to starboard and the boat swung back into the middle of the lock but now we were facing the wrong way; back-to-front in the lock. I put both engines into reverse and mercifully, we reversed out of the lock. The PA crackled again… “Your coming was a lot better than your going!” I could imagine the lock-master’s conversation over beer later with his fellow lock-men. “So, what did he do in your lock? Almost destroyed mine!” The catamaran steamed by us, giving us a wide berth, her crew slowly killing us with their murderous, frightened eyes.

The crew of the catamaran in Lock 2

As you leave Moore Haven to get onto the canal leading to Lake Okeechobee, there is a confusing point where it hard to determine which way to go. A fork, if you will. We took the wrong fork until we began to run out of water and had to reverse down the narrow stream to regain the proper channel. When I look at it now on a Google satellite map or on a chart-plotter, it seems pretty obvious. But after the panic of the lock, the paper charts I was using were not quite clear enough.

About an hour later and with the excitement of  Moore Haven behind us we arrived in Clewiston, Fla. and spent the night at Roland and Mary Ann Martin's Marina which has a restaurant attached and had some good burgers there. If you have stayed at this marina you probably have run into the famous dock attendant who goes by the name of Little Man. He is exactly that; diminutive, wiry and generally of a good nature, he was a bit surly with us at first but when he found out that we were newbies and on top of that, in show business, he opened up and gave us a good hand getting in and out and letting us know about the amenities of the marina. He is one of those dock wizards that can do things like throwing a line at a cleat in such a way as to tie a knot on it from 5 feet away. I was amazed. I thought about asking him to join the crew, perhaps in a straight-up trade for Mister Bruce, but decided against it.

Famous dock-hand, Little Man

Tomorrow... Lake Okeechobee and the Port Mayaca Lock.