The Gulf Coast – Gulfport to Panama City
December 4, 2023
I left my New Orlean’s dock on a Monday morning, entered the Industrial Canal, and went nowhere. To the south, the bridge was down as trains moved back and forth with no timeline for an opening. To the north, the train bridge was down for the Amtrak, so I sat in the canal for an hour. I eventually headed north onto Lake Pontchartrain with my plan to make Gulfport, MS cast overboard because the approaching storm from the west was going to catch me. I got as far as the Rigolets Marina just in time for some massive thunder, lightning, and heavy rain that lasted through the night. I could have arrived sooner, but I had my first encounter with crab pots. I was forced to crawl across the lake’s west basin weaving through several hundred trap buoys strung out helter-skelter in long lines. The challenges for a boater are the placement at random locations and the tiny, smaller than volleyball size buoys of variable colours covered in black algae that you can’t see until you are within 30m. I dodged a snag-up being very happy it was daytime and calm waters. Unfortunately for me, there are more crab-pot obstacle courses in my future.
A short weather window opened the next morning and I dashed east to Gulfport, MS with another storm chasing me. I docked and settled in for a couple of nights while this tempest blew by. These are the days when I catch up on virtual paperwork including my writing. The community was setting up for its Christmas festival on the waterfront, so I did enjoy listening to Christmas music and watching the testing of the light shows.
My next weather window was again short, but it allowed me to make my way east back to Dauphin Island. This time I anchored out on the southeast coast tucked in the town’s sheltered, golf course bay. I was trying to fish along the way, but each time I slowed to troll (put a line out behind the boat) or stopped to fish, the dolphins appeared. I wasn’t sure if that meant they really like WW, I was finding good fishing grounds, or they didn’t want to share their dinner. I always stop fishing when they appear; it would be sad to tangle one of them in my line. I fished at the artificial “fishing reefs” that have been built and are managed for recreational fishing across the Gulf. These create structure or fish habitat, they are effective, and are enjoyed by many fishers, but not me yet. I did catch some “Sand seatrout” once I got anchored.
I had another rainy, washing machine ride leaving Dauphin Island the next morning as I made my way east across Mobile Bay for the last time. I entered the Inter-Coastal Waterway’s canal system again and the sun came out as pulled into Lulu’s at Gulf Shores, AB. Looper boats like this stop and with “the big game” on the next day, it seemed a good place to hold up for a couple of nights. Lulu’s is a curious place run by the late Jimmy Buffet’s sister. It is a bar/southern food/music joint, and local tradition complete with a human-made beach and a collection of family-oriented beach games. It was busy despite the cold weather, and the marina was full. Like all the marinas I have visited, it had a collection of live-aboard residents. They had familiar stories: arrived by boat one day, loved the place and the region, got stuck in the marina because of boat or life issues, and don’t appear to be moving along anytime soon. These folks are always full of interesting life and boating stories told at the marina’s hang-out, and they are always content and happy.
Southerners are crazy about young men playing football. In Alabama, the “big game” is the University of Alabama, Crimson Tide versus the Auburn University Tigers. I learned the Crimson Tide slang, “Roll Tide”, which is spoken as a tag at the end of a conversation. My new local friends urged me to practice and laughed heartedly when my “roll tide” was answered with rolled eyes by a known Tiger’s fan. The University of Alabama is the ‘’Crimson Tide’’ because of the iron in the soil of their stadium that soiled uniforms in the early days. Auburn University is the “Tigers’’ with a tagline “War Eagle” for no particular reason.
Universities are also called colleges in the USA. College football and many other sports have moved far from the original intent of building ‘esprit de corp’ and the personal development of young people. Rich people and corporations have capitalized on youthful passions turning college sports into major industries. This now includes sponsorship of individual college athletes, e.g., the Crimson Tide’s 20-year-old quarterback earns a reported $1M a year, plus a collection of financial perks from the university and its backers. I suppose that if others are profiting from you playing football, then you deserve compensation. However, it remains an exploitation of young people by incentivizing their dream to be a professional athlete when <2% achieve that goal. Canada’s junior hockey programmes are no different. These are truly wonderful opportunities for our youth. Imagine how much greater the societal impact and outcomes could be if this support were equally distributed among all sports, between boys and girls, and included other activities like dance, theater, music, and art that collectively build a strong community and society. I have had this conversation with die-hard college sports fans who explain that other sports and arts activities don’t have the large audiences desired by outside funders, but we all agree these other things are equally important. The solution seems simple enough: every dollar given to men’s college football by a corporation should be matched with an equal contribution to the arts or the underfunded women’s athletics.
Back on the boat, I set off east in the rain and cold yet again. It was an easy ride to a well-protected anchorage at Fort McRee, FL. This is another of the many Civil War-era fortifications along the Gulf coast. The USA is very good at promoting and telling its war stories but often forgets that North America has a long, human history before the European invasion in the late 1700s. I think I was having too many unpatriotic thoughts about the American war machine because at 0630hr the next morning I was rattled out of bed by the practicing Blue Angel jets. Their home base is Naval Air Station Pensacola and their landing approach was a few hundred metres directly overhead, gracing me with my second airshow of the expedition. I spent a few nights at anchor chilling, literally. This was the start of really cold weather that won’t go away. With another storm brewing in the west on the third day, I wayed anchor quickly at first light and boated into Pensacola, FL to find a hot coffee and breakfast. My final destination that day was farther along at Pensacola Beach Marina (Pensacola Beach, FL) where I was planning to dock, batten down the hatches, and wait out the next storm.
I was able to check out Pensacola Beach before the storm hit. The expansive white sand beach stretched as far as you could see and because it was cold, there was just a scattering of people and one crazy, naked Canadian who swam with the cruising Cownose rays. I enjoyed the beach, the fishing pier (they love fishing here), and an excellent fish dinner featuring the unexpected, Mullet. Mullet is a local favourite served on Thursdays at The Paradise fish fry. According to my new friends, these local fish feed off the local, sandy bottom waters which makes them taste significantly better than Mullet from those muddy-bottomed waters elsewhere. And the fish was fried of course, which means deep-fried and it was the entire fish (sans guts): “Them bones and tail are like bar chips…”, which was a local pallet opinion. My veggies, the popular southern okra, were also deep-fried. If you don’t want deep-fried here in the south, you have to ask for ‘pan-fried’ and sometimes when that doesn’t resonate, ‘blackened’, otherwise your entire meal is cooked submerged in hot oil. The storm came, blew and rained hard, and kept me in a rocking boat for 3 days. The marina guys were very friendly and knowledgeable providing lots of advice on the weather and waters lying ahead, and even a mess of ‘seatrout’ for dinner one day.
I really enjoy watching the seabirds fishing, the pelicans skimming the water surface, and the dolphins crisscrossing WW as we travel the Gulf’s northern coastline. If you wondered where our Canadian Common loons go in winter, I have encountered 25 a day along the inside passage of the Gulf Islands since arriving in Florida’s panhandle, which makes them actual Canadian snowbirds.
I was getting anxious to move and the weather was predicted to be calm on Sunday morning so I prepared to leave early for Panama City, FL. Not predicted was the fog that engulfed WW when I awoke. I sat for an hour until it started to clear, then headed out of the harbour only to get socked in again within 10 minutes. The term “socked in” likely arose from airport language describing the inability to see the windsock at the end of a runway during WWII, so it’s about 1km. I contemplated retracing my route back into the marina when the fog lifted and a new marine forecast called it “intermittent but heavy”, so I decided to proceed east at a slow pace. I didn’t get too far when I had to stop again, forced to follow the chart plotter to a safe anchor spot where I waited and watched my radar for other vessels. The next break in the fog produced two boats heading east. In another of my journey’s non-random moments, I recognized them as Looper boats headed to Panama City and I quickly joined their flotilla. They stopped for fuel and I got ahead of them, but a heavy fog came back. Forced out of the channel to find an anchor spot again, I sat in zero visibility contemplating my next move. Within the hour, my 2 buddy boats re-appeared on my radar and I happily fell in behind them. We had to stay close while navigating fog and rain, a narrow, deep walled canal where the weather and tall banks disrupted radio communications and the radar created ghost vessels in my path, a near miss with a towboat and its barges, a tug that tried hard to smash our boats into a bridge pier at dusk, and then a long, open water ride navigating by marker buoys into Panama City in the dark. I don’t know who or what sent me the buddy boats, but I was extremely thankful.
Panama City was my last stop before Christmas. WW needed a propeller refurbishment and some new electronics along with routine engine maintenance. She got a lift onto the drydock for a few weeks. I headed home on wobbly sea legs to plan the next stages of my expedition and enjoy a much-needed period of rest and recovery.
Until next time and the start of my travels to the far south.
Allen
Panama City, FL
