Day 127 - Okeechobee — Captain Father John

This is the blog post for John and Priscilla on Star Fisher the President 47′ fast trawler.

It poured rain all night. There may have been wind gusts but we were so well tucked in at Rollan Martin’s Marina we could not feel it. Being tied up next to the Tiki bar made it a little noisy until midnight then things quieted down. Bill Valters advised Clewiston is the bass fishing capital. There certainly were lots of bass boats around us to support the claim.

The entrance to Clewiston is a hurricane gate for the levy. It is robust and short. It can act as a lock for one boat at a time.

The area beside Lake Okeechobee was once used as a fishing camp by the Seminole Indians. The first permanent settlement began in 1920, when John O’Brien of Philadelphia and Alonzo Clewis of Tampa purchased a large tract of land to establish a town. They commissioned a town plan and built the Moore Haven & Clewiston Railroad to connect the community to the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad at Moore Haven. Incorporated as a city in 1925, Clewiston would become noted for its sport fishing, particularly of largemouth bass.

We cast off at 7:30 am and crossed a flat Lake Okeechobee. In the Seminole language Okeechobee means “big water.” It was a quick 25 mile crossing to Port Mayaca and our first lock. It was somewhat anti-climactic with only a one foot drop. We came to a railroad lift bridge that is almost always open. Not this time but we did not have to wait long for the train to pass.

If you look closely you can see the train crossing the bridge.

The bridge operates automatically.

Lake Okeechobee is the second largest freshwater lake located wholly in the US after Lake Michigan. All of the other Great Lakes share a shore with Canada.

The St Lucie lock made up for the Mayaca lock with a 14′ drop. This was accomplished in the pouring rain. The upper helm on Star Fisher has Eisenglass (high quality clear vinyl) but no windshield wipers. As visibility became worse I took the canvass off the lower helm windows and we moved below. The lower helm has no seat so when we are crushing at higher speeds (16 mph) the bow lifts up and I can’t see over it. Chris is 6’4″ so he has good visibility. I can helm when we are at idle speed and the bow is down.

We cruised 30 miles from Port Mayaca to Stuart. There are many manatee zones where we have to travel at near idle speed (6.5mph) and in residential areas with docks they have no wake zones posted with signs stating “video surveillance of wake damage.” You are responsible for your wake.

Once we arrived in Stuart we headed south on the inter coastal waterway. The homes along the ICW are amazing. Many homes have huge yachts tied up in front.

Carl (Chef) Wooden – quote for the day

“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS (/ˈnjuːtən/;[6] 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27[1]) was an English physicist and mathematician (described in his own day as a “natural philosopher”) who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and as a key figure in the scientific revolution. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”), first published in 1687, laid the foundations for classical mechanics. Newton made seminal contributions to optics, and he shares credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of calculus.

Newton’s Principia formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, which dominated scientists’ view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. By deriving Kepler’s laws of planetary motion from his mathematical description of gravity, and then using the same principles to account for the trajectories of comets, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, and other phenomena, Newton removed the last doubts about the validity of the heliocentric model of the Solar System. This work also demonstrated that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies could be described by the same principles. His prediction that Earth should be shaped as an oblate spheroid was later vindicated by the measurements of Maupertuis, La Condamine, and others, which helped convince most Continental European scientists of the superiority of Newtonian mechanics over the earlier system of Descartes.

Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours of the visible spectrum. He formulated an empirical law of cooling, studied the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.