Cayo Costa Softly Kills It

Per late-season tradition, the Fort Myers Offshore group took a break from its ritual of Saturday lunch runs to restaurants in Southwest Florida and headed to Cayo Costa Cay yesterday for its annual beach raft-up. Fort Myers Offshore board-member Neal Kirby estimated 50 of the 100-plus boats pulled up on the shore belonged to members of the nonprofit scholarship-fundraising club.

With yesterday’s Cayo Costa raft-off complete, just one one event remains in the 2024/2025 Fort Myers Offshore season. Aerial drone photos by Mikey Boyle.

“Most people got there around 11 a.m. and left at 2:30 p.m.,” he said. “A few brought barbecues to cook. Others just brought lunches.

“It was a very mellow time,” he added.

Former Fort Myers Offshore board-member Amanda Gardner and her husband, Don, participated in the 36-foot outboard-engine-powered Skater catamaran. Despite what she described as “great but windy” conditions for the trip to the cay from their home in Cape Coral, Gardner was impressed by the turnout.

She also seconded Kirby’s boat-estimate.

The annual island raft-off is the only event of its kind in the Fort Myers Offshore rotation.

“Of the more than 100 boats there at least half were from FMO,” she said. “It really was the perfect beach weather.”

There may even have been a few more club-member boats in the mix, as not all of them were beached on the shoreline. By the time Mike Boyle and his friends arrived in his MTI 390X catamaran, raft-up spots on the sand were scarce.

But that didn’t mean they had to head home—far from it.

“Our group of 10 cats met up at 11:15 a.m. at the end of the ‘Miserable Mile’ and ran down together,” explained. “When we arrived, the beach was pretty much full of boats, so we rafted off our friend Isaac’s 44-foot Concept center console, which had its anchors already set. That made it much easier for the cats. Plus, he had the tunes going all day long.

“The nice breeze allowed for everyone to comfortably enjoy the sunny, 90-degree day,” he added.

At least half of yesterday’s boats at Cayo Costa belonged to Fort Myers Offshore members.

Yet Boyle, who generally operates at high-level of stoke, wasn’t the happiest MTI owner in the fun-run. That distinction belong to club-member Chuck Stark, who recently took delivery of a 2022 model-year MTI-V 50 center console.

Equipped with five Mercury Racing 450R outboards, the 50-footer “ran in beast mode and ate up the water” with 13 people on board, he said.

Enjoy more images from yesterday’s happening in the slideshow above.

“The new boat is just a bad-ass,” added Stark, who formerly owned an MTI-V 42 center console. “It’s the best upgrade trade-in I’ve ever done.”

With the start of the offshore racing season a little more than a month away, Super Stock-class racers Chris Hopgood and Daren Kittredge couldn’t resist putting what little pleasure-boating time they have left this year to good use. They joined the Cayo Costa fleet in Hopgood’s 42-foot Doug Wright pleasure-cat.