Today we traveled from Sarasota to Boca Grande. Along the ICW in this area are miles and miles of slow speed manatee protection zones. I can’t say for certain if we saw a manatee, but we did see lots of pelicans. And channel markers. And pelicans on channel markers.

This is a channel marker. The gold square indicates it is an Intracoastal Waterway channel marker. We try to keep the green ones on the starboard side of the boat.

We also went under a bunch of bridges. First here was the Siesta Key bridge.

Notice the depth gauge. This tells you how much space there is underneath the bridge. If you don’t like running into things with your boat, it is a good idea to pay attention to these.

After we went under Stickney Point bridge, the next one was Blackburn Point Bridge. This one was unique from all the others. Most bridges in this area are bascule bridges. But this bridge was a swing bridge. It pivots in the center to open. A guy has to manually stop traffic and then walk to the center of the bridge to swing it open. Cool, huh?

Next up was Albee Road Bridge. This one was a challenge because it is only 12 feet high at the center when it is closed. Normally our boat has a 14 foot “air draft”, so we would need to ask for an opening.

But Blue Sky has a trick for this situation. The main mast can be folded down. This gives us an air draft of only 10 feet. So I went up top and lowered the mast. We cleared the bridge with a foot or so to spare.

There were many more bridges today, but none presented any problems. In all we went under 10 bridges. Here are some of the other sites we saw along the way.

We arrived at our destination for the day a little later than planned.

Boca Grande is beautiful.