Doing the Ditch

Monday, March 9th, Treasure Island Yacht Club

We are doing the ditch, for those of you who are marine challenged that means we are taking the ICW. A brief history lesson here; the ICW is a protected waterway that runs from Brownsville, Texas to New Jersey. A lot of it is in bays and rivers but there are long stretches is in dredged canals thus the name “The Ditch”. It is a great way to travel with two minor issues bridges and shallow water. Well when you are 65’ tall and 6’-2” deep those are not minor issues. Most of the bridges in this section are bascule bridges, which is a real adventure. If you live on or trying to get to an island those damn sailboat keep wanting to wonder up and down the ICW stopping traffic. There is a lot of pressure from residence to have a minimum number of openings. As a side note there is one in DC that opens once daily at 3:00 AM. The bridge tenders don’t like to have the bridges open for any longer than possible. When the bridge is open enough for your spreaders to not hang on the bridge girders then they want you to come thru. One woman (she certainly wasn’t a fine southern lady) keep telling us to come on we were going too slow. We get to the bridge and have to back down hard to keep from hitting it. After we go thru the bridge, barely clearing with our spreaders the bridge continues to open and remains open for another 5 minutes with no other traffic. You have to ask yourself what was the #^$* point in that. I will get off my soapbox now and continue on. By going down the ditch, you see a LOT of beautiful houses. There is a lot of money of money along that path, of course there are bunch of them with for sale signs with reduced on the sign.

We pull into Treasure Island Yacht Club. The club was closed on Monday. Les the dockmaster met us even though it was his day off. After things are secure, we take off on our bicycles to tour Treasure Island. We have to go check out the Publix grocery story that was built on stilts to get it above the wave action. It has 4 hospital size elevators, to get the groceries up and down to the street. There is a beautiful wide beach with pretty white sand. We can highly recommend the Grouper sandwiches at Sloppy Joes.