De Soto National Monument, Bradenton

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 221 - November 8, 2017

It has been no secret that we are anxious to get home. We have really enjoyed the whole Loop. We might have dashed home from Mobile, but we could see we would make it home by Christmas, so we took the time  to enjoy Pensacola, Apalachicola, Cedar Key, and Tarpon Springs. Even the overnights in Bayport and Caladesi Island were fun. Crystal River was fine except for not seeing the famed manatees!

We are now,  we must confess, officially on a "schedule," the bane of all cruising! We want to be in Cape Coral on Friday the 10th, where we will visit with our friends Cecil and Danny on Friday and Saturday, who just completed their Loop on Desperado . We will depart Cape Coral on Sunday the 12th for Labelle, where we will cross our wake as we pass the Ortona Lock Boat Ramp. After going through the lock, we'll go on to River Forest Yacht Basin, where our truck and trailer are stored. We hope our C-Dory friend Jim Widmann from Naples will help with the logistics of retrieval at the Labelle Boat Ramp, since River Forest says our C-Dory is too small for their TraveLift! So this means tomorrow night's anchorage will be our last on the Loop!

Today we cruised 52 miles from Caladesi Island State Park to the De Soto National Monument in Bradenton.  On the way, we saw this sailboat on the rocks. We are guessing the sailboat hit the rocks at high tide and couldn't get off, and then the tide went out. Not a pretty picture!

Sailboat on the rocks!

We were orginally looking at an anchorage called Bayway Structure E, which is shown as an anchorage in Active Captain with shore access but not mentioned in Skipper Bob, but when we got there, we realized it was not nearly far enough, so we looked at Active Captain, and thought the Manatee River anchorages looked good, especially the De Soto National Monument. To get there, we had to cross Tampa Bay. This is a large body of water! We had a calm day, for which we were grateful, because we can see how this could be a very unpleasant crossing with significant wind and waves. The ICW channel across Tampa Bay takes some crazy twists and turns but we know the channel goes the way it does for a good reason, so we just followed the daymarks. We got passed by this big boy in Tampa Bay, a dinner cruise ship out at lunch time!

The Starlight Sapphire dinner cruise ship on Tampa Bay

The De Soto National Monument anchorage in Bradenton is a great anchorage, where we were able to anchor close to a sandy beach right opposite the monument. This is a historical and recreational site, not a bird sanctuary, so dogs are welcome. This anchorage is known locally as "The Cross"! In addition to the cross, there is an obelisk, which is the actual monument,  with an interpretive sign about Hernando de Soto (1500 - 1542).  There once was a bronze statue on the base of the monument, but due to vandalism, it has moved to a museum in Bradenton. The Cross and the monument are both owned by the Dioscese of Venice. They paint de Soto as "the Catholic Conquistador" and talk only about his 12 priests and friars, but how accurate that is may be open to question, since he could not expect to conquer Florida only with a band of priests! He had soldiers and mercenaries for that task!

Screenshot of de Soto National Monument anchorage

The Cross at De Soto National Monument

In May 1539, Conquistador Hernando de Soto’s army of soldiers, hired mercenaries, craftsmen and clergy made landfall in Tampa Bay. They were met with fierce resistance of indigenous people protecting their homelands. De Soto’s quest for glory and gold would be a four year, four thousand mile odyssey of intrigue, warfare, disease, and discovery that would form the history of the United States. In 1537 Hernando de Soto would meet with the Emperor Charles V and impress him with his tales from the Indies. Charles would later approve De Soto's request to govern and conquer a portion of the New World, a place named La Florida. De Soto would depart Spain in September 1537 to travel to Cuba were he would claim his title of Governor and begin forming his expedition to La Florida.

May 1539 De Soto would depart Havana and sail for a selected bay on Florida's west coast to begin the expedition that would cost him his fortune and his life.  You can read more about De Soto on the National Parks Service De Soto webpage here.

We once again had potstickers for dinner! Patty makes the meat filling with ground pork sausage, garlic, chopped onion, a little soy sauce, a little sesame oil and some corn starch. She puts the filling in potsticker wrappers, inches the edges shut. She steams them with a lid on the pan, then takes the lid off for the the water to evaporate, and the bottoms to get brown and crisp. We do not feel at all limited in what we can cook in our little boat. It tickles me when I read other Looper accounts of how they eat out most nights!

Patty making potstickers in Daydream's galley!

Finally, I heard from the gentlemen who visited me and gave me the bottle of bourbon! HIs name is Nick Catsos. He follows a number of Looper blogs, and pointed out something I had not noticed before. At the very top of a blog, above the title, there is a link for "Next blog" and that is how he found Daydream's Loop. Nick has been interested in the Loop since about 1990, but doubts that he will ever do it himself (never say never, Nick!). He was interested at one time in C-Dorys but driving from inside a cabin in Florida in the summer would be a horror in his opinion. Thanks, NIck!