Victory At Sea—Beating The Fog

Dense fog is not uncommon this time of year in Southwest Florida, and yesterday it blanketed long sections of the Sunshine Coast. As you’d expect, it made for slow going on the water. The 120-plus-mile trip from Cape Coral to St. Petersburg, for example, should take about two hours.

Thanks mostly to the fog, it took six.

Devin Wozencraft found a patch of clear air in his 34-foot Victory catamaran. Photos by Pete Boden copyright Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.

How do I know? Because I did it yesterday with South Carolina’s Chuck Stark and his wife, Shannon, and their friends Dale and Sandi Minnick in the Stark’s 39-foot outboard engine-equipped MTI catamaran. We left the Stark’s Cape Coral home at 8 a.m. We reached Doc Ford’s Rum Bar and Grille in St. Pete—our group lunch-run destination—at 2 p.m.

Quick math puts our average speed at 20 mph, not a bad pace for, say, some shirtless, barefoot stoner riding a moped in Key West. But it wasn’t so hot for a high-performance catamaran that cruises easily at 120 mph with an experienced driver at the wheel. Still, we arrived safely, though with no shortage of frazzled nerves, as did 40 to 50 other captains and their guests.

Chuck Stark (left) and Dale Minnick stared into the abyss.

The worst of it, at least for our group, began in Cape Coral and extended through Fort Myers Beach and portions of Venice. The fog disappeared from Sarasota to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the gateway to Tampa Bay. That was all photographer Pete Boden needed to capture performance boats in action on a “sunny day.”

But the fog came back big in the bay and delivered one last stress-test before we reached St. Pete.

Shaun Torrente led a group of clients in town for the week to lunch at Doc Ford’s.

Other participants such as Kristin Grannis told similar tales. Experienced and well-known in the performance-boating community, Grannis was still shaking when she reached the docks.

“I have never seen anything like that,” she said.

Wisconsin’s Jordan Hart and Nikki Mueller are finishing up their busy 2024 boating season in Southwest Florida this week.

Lunch provided an essential break from staring into the endless gray, barely moving and hoping nothing hard suddenly appeared off the bow. The skies parted over St Pete at 3 p.m., and it looked as if the ride south to departure points down the coast would be lovely.

But by the time the boats that departed after 4 p.m. reached Sarasota—my destination for the night—the fog was back and near-shore visibility was close to zero. Conditions were so awful, in fact, that the Starks, the Minnicks and their friends Stephen and Heather Miles wisely docked their MTI cats behind the Sarasota Hyatt and got rooms for the night rather than fight the fog in the approaching darkness.

Photographer Pete Boden made great use of the time he had in clear weather.

The day was not without a few delights. Among them was the show put on by a half-dozen or so dolphins a few feet behind the Starks’ catamaran. The pod entertained us for perhaps 15 minutes. Then it disappeared.

Clearly, the dolphins had places to be. And they weren’t about to let a little fog slow them down.