By Morgan Stinemetz

Ah, Florida, beautiful beaches, the easy life, and sailing that's out of this world. Well, sometimes. Maybe most of the time. But Florida's size guarantees a sailor a little bit of everything. To give you an idea of the size of the state, it is further from Key West, via car, to Pensacola than it is from Pensacola to Chicago. Part of the reason has to do with the unusual layout of the state. From Key West, you have to go east before you go north and then you have to go west before you go north gain and then you have to go west again to get to Pensacola, way out there at the edge of the Florida Panhandle.

Florida's north coast-Apalachicola, Panama City, Pensacola-is a separate entity, estranged from the west coast by a broken link in the ICW from Clearwater to Apalachicola. Out there, in the Big Bend area, you are pretty much on your own while voyaging. Keeping a weather eye out is just plain good sense. In the cooler months frontal systems that don't have the power to bother peninsular Florida much can paste the Panhandle hard.

The passes at Pensacola, Panama City and Apalachicola are rather straightforward, well marked and handled easily if the weather is fair. But it is a good cruise between any of them. The ICW in the Panhandle cuts through many shallow bays and unless the wind is just right this means some lengthy motoring.

Florida's west coast is the state's most diverse. It offers large bays to sail in-most particularly Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor-and a number of passes a skipper can transit to get inside to the ICW or outside to the Gulf of Mexico. The water on the west coast, however, is shallow, so having an ace in the hole (Sea Tow) is always a good idea. The bottom is sand or mud; rocks are rare. The upper part of the west coast is heavily populated, particularly the greater Tampa Bay area. Above Clearwater, the population thins out considerably, but shoal water creeps out from the coast all the way up to Apalachicola, so yachting in this area, while do-able, requires some specialized knowledge and the patience to motor up narrow channels for miles.

Between Clearwater and Naples, there are at least a dozen passes that work. Not all of them are maintained as we might like them to be, but the federal government and our representatives don't always do what we want. That's why we have elections. Clearwater Pass, John's Pass, Pass-A-Grille, the Egmont Ship Channel, Southwest Pass, Longboat Pass, Venice Inlet, Boca Grande Pass, Redfish Pass, Fort Myers Beach, Gordon Pass and Capri Pass are usually always open and viable.
If you are not certain about the pass you are looking at, make sure that you get a good one. There are some inviting openings that turn to absolute junk when you get committed. In one Sarasota pass, a skipper lost a steel-hulled sailboat, which went down in the middle of the pass. Eventually, some governmental agency put a floating marker near it. Fast forward a few months and here comes a guy who had just laid out something pretty close to a million dollars for his new yacht. It was his first day solo on the helm, though he had been out with a paid skipper before. For reasons that defy logic he hit the steel hulled sailboat and his boat went down. The salvage people gut it into little pieces with chain saws and put it into Dumpsters, many, many of them.

If you are sailing the coast and plan to spend the night "inside," make the transition in daylight. You will need to eyeball everything.

Below Naples lies little, which is part of the region's charm. When you are in the Ten Thousand Islands-mangroves mostly-you are far removed from anything you have ever seen before, except mosquitoes. But there are times in the winter when you can loaf about down in this part of Florida and probably live off the fish you catch. If one goes up the Little Shark River, the trip into the Everglades can take you up river for eight miles in a sailboat drawing 4-5 feet. It is not a place to explore in a dinghy unless you have a GPS that you really know how to use along with you. One mangrove island looks just like the next one. This is not a place to swim either. There are alligators, big alligators, up here.

The Florida Keys are, well, unique. This is a place where a guidebook would make a great deal of sense; there just is so much to engage you. Between the Keys and the mainland is Florida Bay. It is shallow, very shallow, but it has great names-Dildo Bank, First National Bank. In fact, if your sailboat draws much more than four feet, you will probably want to move over to the deeper Hawk Channel, the maritime highway on the Atlantic side, when you get to the Seven Mile Bridge just west of Marathon. Either side will work, of course, if the wind is right. The prevailing winds down here are southeasterly, which help make transiting the Keys a nice reach. Take your time in the Keys. There is much to see, not the least of which is Key West. The town is different in a thousand diverse ways. Two or three days here are a must. Find Michael's, a steak house of superlative dinners and perfect service. It isn't cheap, but it's worth every penny.

The east coast of Florida means people, buildings and a return to civilization. For those who can deal with it, there's nothing you cannot find on the Gold Coast. There are marinas here that cater to the silver spoon set. Then there are the others. Usually, though, transient space is at a premium on the east coast of Florida. Plan ahead. Call ahead.

There are some great passes on the east coat. Government Cut at Miami is one. The Port Everglades channel at Fort Lauderdale is another. Both get commercial and military traffic. We've seen a nuclear submarine on the surface in the Port Everglades channel; it was huge.

While our experience is severely limited in the passes north of Fort Lauderdale, we know that tidal currents in some of these passes are very strong. People die after making mistakes in these passes every year, so having a plan for arriving at slack tide is a good idea. Of course, the Gulf Stream is just offshore. Use it going north. Avoid it going south by staying close to the beach.

The ICW is a busy artery on this side of Florida. All kinds of boats shuttle north and south on it with the seasons, coming and going from New England and the Chesapeake. You'll find the competent mixed in with the incompetent. It was on the ICW in Fort Lauderdale that a muscle boat made the news by going so fast that it got airborne and penetrated a waterfront condo on the second story.

One of the nice things about lower eastern Florida is that it's the jumping off place to go to the Bahamas. People go over by the thousands. If the winds are from a southerly quadrant, the trip is heaven. If they have a northerly component the Gulf Stream can come up with "square waves" that usually result in people who have been out in them wish they had taken up bowling instead of sailing.

Florida sailing can be as good as it gets. For six months out of the year, spring and fall, it's superb. In the winter, fronts dominate the weather picture and some of them bring cold weather and even, yes, snow with them, a fact you'll never see on anything put out by the state on tourism opportunities. In the summer, the weather is more spotty, with thunderstorms dominating in the late afternoon scene. Being well insured makes a body feel a little more comfortable when lightning streaks across the sky. And, of course, Florida summers are hot.

To sail and not experience the diversity of the Sunshine State is like going to Walt Disney World and staying in your hotel room so you can watch professional wrestling.

- Morgan Stinemetz

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