| We moved down from Useppa to York Island and St James City on Saturday. Sunday morning we got the dinghy rigged and went up the canals. Up Monroe Canal is a little biker bar called Woody's. We pulled in and had a great fish sandwich and a beer. On down the canal is is a fuel dock run by a young mother. She took care of our mail, loaded up the dinghy gas tank, and sold us some Yuengling.
St James City is kinda weird - lots of canals with beautiful boats tied up to docks. Almost all the houses were double wides. It's like the folks came there on boats and then brought in a trailer as an afterthought.
The next morning we decided to go over to Ft Myers Beach through the Sanibel Causeway Bridge. On our charts (dated 1996) and on our map chip, the causeway has a bascule bridge on the south side of the three bridge span. We approached the bridge and as we looked we couldn't see any way to raise the bridge, much less a bridgekeeper. We hailed on channel 9 to no avail. As we got closer we saw that the bridge was fixed and the heighth was very close to our mast size. We looked for sign marking the clearance but there were workman barges all around and any sign was concealed. We hailed three old geezers on a fishing boat to see if they knew the clearance. They zipped over to the bridge and asked the workmen - 70 feet they said. We are close to 65' so we headed slowly for it. The workmen stopped working as we approached and then gave us the thumbs up as we went under with 5 feet to spare. Some fun! Some charts!
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