Well, folks, as with nearly all of my Photo Adventures in mind, this one had its moments for sure, but at least this time the disaster portion of it was nearly at the end of the trip. Although I decided to leave early due to the extenuating circumstances, I had originally planned on a 4 or 5-day photo trip with my boat down to the Everglades Ten Thousand Islands to camp, fish, and of course to photograph.
The endless waterscapes and pristine white sandy beaches abound everywhere, but ya need a boat to get there and to get around. I had my 17-foot center console Blue Wave Blue Skiff, powered by a 70 HP 2-stroke Yamaha, a great combination capable of speeds exceeding 40 mph in a light chop. This boat has a lot of room, plenty of deck and floor space, and 2 large dry storage lockers to keep my equipment dry from a heavy downpour should that occur. The deck is self-bailing so not much of a worry there about sinking the boat and it was also equipped with an auto bilge pump for those unattended nightly storms that will come up in a hurry.
On this camping trip, I bought my 8'x10' dome tent, and a double size air mattress, and a sleeping bag. I even brought my porta potty since I had plenty of room in the boat. I had a 2'x4' table, 2 burner camp stove, and all of the cooking utensils needed for this trip, and of course my trusty aluminum coffee pot that I have had for nearly 45 years. I brought my 40-quart cooler, a camp chair, and a 10'x20' plastic tarp with 6 pieces of 1/2"x10' long PVC pipes that I made into a Quonset type rain/shade fly and a ton of rope. So you can see I was loaded with everything I needed for a comfortable 4-5 day camping trip. I had no shortage of camera equipment as well.
My camera bag was pretty well stuff. I had 3 canon camera bodies, 4 canon lenses, 2 tripods, and all of the goodies that could be stuffed into that bag. I even had my 400 watt 12 V power inverter to recharge camera batteries and lights. The island that I choose to camp on was hopefully going to provide a perfect set up for camping with some shade trees and a suitable place to work from as well as some interesting shoreline features for shooting the Milky Way, even though it was in a full moon cycle. Now, normally the full moon phase is not desirable for shooting Milky Way landscape scenes because of the brightness of the moon. However, there is a very good time to do so and that is just before the moon is setting. The moonlight at that point is not too excessively bright and in some circumstances may add a warm color cast to the foreground. In my case, the two mornings that I did have to shoot, was around 5 am. The moon was setting in the west and the Milky Way was still above the southeastern horizon. This gave me about an hour to photograph the Milky Way. Since all of the Milky Way photography was done on the same stretch of island beach that I was camping on, I didn’t need to run my boat in the darkness. Even if I had wanted to do so, I could not as the boat was sitting high and dry on the sandy bottom of the flat at this 5 AM low tide.
So day one was getting there and setting up my camp for the week. It was late in the afternoon by the time everything was in place and since it was low tide, I decided to just enjoy the warm orange glow of the afternoon’s sunset.
I woke up that first morning, day two, beating my alarm by an hour. I looked out the tent window at some very bright stars overhead. Since I had plenty of time, I got up and made coffee and just admired what looked like heaven to me with the bright yellow colored moon slowly dropping over the horizon. It appeared more like a sunset as opposed to a moonset. The sandy beach was now much wider due to the extreme low tide and the dead trees that covered the islands, just standing there ready to be foreground elements for photographing the Milky Way. Many of these dead trees were the results of the many hurricanes that have ravaged these islands over the years.
After the rising sun began to fill the sky with light the Milky Way photography was over for day one.
After the tide came in and floated my boat, I was now ready to do some exploring my surrounding area of the many islands that make up the Ten Thousand Islands. The photography waterscapes images were endless with white sandy beaches on nearly every island and the best part of this trip...no people! I have learned one thing over the many years of photographing and that is to go in the middle of the week...not on weekends.
I was hoping for bright white puffy clouds to fill the sky for both color and B&W infrared photography, but this is still wintertime, the first part of February to be exact. Our weather fronts here move in and out dragging those clouds further south.
The summer months would have been better, but then the no-can-sees and mozzies would have been horrendous. That future photo adventure will have to wait until later in the year. The benefit of summer would be better cloud formation during the day, the Milky Way would be more visible during the later summer months and the bugs would be at their best as well...more bug juice, please.
The small tidal flat directly out in front of my campsite had some interesting, but small in size, reef material scattered about with patches of white sandy bottom. A few times I had to walk across this hard material to get to my boat and reposition it back over the sandy bottom. I didn’t really want to walk on the small corals, oysters, and sponge material if need be. However I did, and I cut up my feet on those sharp oysters, right through my crocks.
So now day two was not without some consequences...which is normal for me.
Day two came to a close with a beautiful sunset. All sunsets are beautiful, some are just better than others. However, a few more clouds would have been very appreciated.
Day three started out much the same, getting up in time to photograph the last stages of the setting moon...after coffee of course. Then I walked further down the beach to find new and more interesting dead trees and tidal flats with pockets of water for some Milky Way reflections... something everyone should experience at least once in their lives. You can really appreciate seeing the Milky Way when you are in dark places without the glow of far away city lights.
I had chosen my campsite location-based more on the prevailing wind direction to be able to have some air flowing through the tent. I needed a location that had some trees in which to tie ropes to hold up my Quonset style sunshade tarp.
I knew that there might be a chance for a weak cold front to move through the area late Wednesday, but not taking my compass or looking at the boat compass when choosing which island I was going to camp on provide to be a big fatal mistake. As it were, the site I choose seemed to be facing SW which is where the winter cold fronts approach from when they get that far south.
My wife had called about mid-afternoon informing me of the severity of an approaching storm front and that it was a fast-moving storm. Oh! I said...how fast?...she said it was
moving at about 50 miles per hour with some heavy pockets of rain. I immediately thought about how screwed I was and how was I going to deal with my boat. I only had one anchor with me on this trip, which was adequate for that size of boat in calm water. However, it would not be near enough to handle 40-50 MPH winds, especially on an outgoing tide and incoming winds. I waded out again and repositioned the boat a bit closer to the beach in a shallow sandy area, hoping the tide would recede faster than the approaching storm. If the boat was to sit on the sandy bottom, then I only had to contend with the waves and water getting in the boat, which the bilge pump would pump it back out.
I set the anchor out with all the remaining rope I had left and stood on it to drive the flukes deeper into the sand. I now could only hope that it would hold. This was about 5 PM.
I went back to the tent to lie down and rest the OLE Bones.
A bit later and approaching dark thirty, I could hear the boat hitting on the coral bottom. So out I go again and reposition the boat back to where I originally anchored it. I then noticed the immensity of the storm... it was massive, covering the sky with inky black...no clouds just pure black, from the West on my right around to the South in front of me. The storm was coming around the south side of Marco Island, the last of the landmass between it and where I was camping.
This storm was now heading directly towards my location. Lighting was flashing on both sides of me. It was still a bit far off in the distance, but I knew it was still too close for me to be standing knee-deep in the water. I decided to move my boat into much deeper water so I waded out to armpit depth and reset the anchor again. I didn't want my boat to be pounding on that hard bottom. By the time I got out of the water and walked up the beach, the gale force winds hit like a ton of bricks, followed by the pelting rain. As I approached my tent I could see it leaning heavily to the side. It was a good thing I had all of those ropes tied to the trees, as they were the only things keeping everything intact. I made it under the tarp and sat down in the chair with my back to the storm. I was wrapped in the tarp and just had to wait out whatever was to happen. I had an ominous feeling that the tent was going to be wet inside, and it was, along with the bedding. These lightweight tents are OK in light rain but not with those kinds of winds. When the side walls touch anything on the inside it creates a point in the fabric where water enters. I thought that I had most of everything moved to the center of the tent, but when it finally blew overall bets were now off. I reset the tent ropes and poles to upright the tent again but noticed that 2 of the fiberglass support poles were broken, and suddenly a strong gust of wind blew it down along with the tarp I put up over the table and camp stove. My campsite now looked like a war zone. When I was finally able to get inside the tent and moved the wet stuff to one side and turned the air mattress over...I found part of the bedding that was not wet and pulled it over me and said good night.
That storm did move through fast, but it really made a total mess of my campsite and much more as I was later to find out. I got up the next morning to find my boat further up on the beach than I had hoped for. In fact, it was up very high and dry. When I got to it, the back half of the boat was full of water, which should have drained out thru the above deck transom holes, but didn't. I had to open the floor access cover hatch over the bilge pump in order for the water to drain down into the bottom of the hull and turn on the pump. It took about 10 minutes to pump out the water. It was still somewhat low tide but the winds were blowing the tide in quicker than normal.
No time for coffee this morning. I packed everything up as quick as I could and stowed it in the boat. I then sat in my chair and waited for the tide to come in and back up the beach so that I could hopefully get the boat floating again. I had nearly fallen asleep sitting there when I felt the bow of the boat begin to move. Now its time to get to work, or so I thought. It took another hour before the water and waves began to move the stern of the boat but still not near enough to do much in the way of moving it to deeper water. So now I thought that if I could swing the bow of the boat towards the waves and incoming tide, it would rock the stern loose. Well, that didn’t go as planned. Instead, the waves seemed to be getting much higher with the wind. The boat was now pointing downhill towards the water with the bow much lower than the stern. It didn’t take more than a couple of those high waves breaking over the bow to again fill the boat with water.
I was doomed again and was not going to catch any break this morning for sure. The tide was now beginning to recede but the waves were still dumping water into the boat. The only good thing...it was flowing out as fast as it was coming in. Everything was soaked with some stuff underwater and some items floating around in the front of the boat. My good tarpon fly reel and rod were under...the cooler was floating as was the front dry box. The rear dry box where my camera equipment was stored was sliding into the water. I was able to get it back up to the high side and tie it off. I then began moving everything out of the boat and back up on dry land. Once that was done all I could do at this point was to sit and wait for the tide to fall and the waves to subside. I now had to resort to calling in the rescue crew...my brother-in-law. After an hour or so the tide was much lower and the waves were not coming into the boat, so I began to bail the water out. I had bailed about half of the water out when I heard a boat and looked up to see my brother-in-law and his son coming to my rescue.
Pulling beached and sandbar stuck boats was nothing new to them and they seemed not too concerned that my boat was on total dry land and the shallow water was about 5 feet from the bow of my boat. They helped bail the remaining water out of the deck while the bilge pump took care of the water down in the hull. I kept thinking we would have to wait for high tide again but they knew a nifty trick. Being mullet fishermen and having a mullet skiff, a type boat where the motor is as far in the front of the boat as it can be. It is called a tunnel hull. They just got up as close as they could float their boat and tied onto my bow eye and put their boat in gear with about half throttle and just waited.
I had no idea what they were waiting for but in a matter, a just a few minutes, my boat began to inch forward and then shot forward and was now floating again. The water from their boat's motor washed down the tunnel and washed the sand out from under my boat until it created a huge hole under my boat. The next wave did the rest. I was very impressed, to say the least by their ability, and the fact that my boat was now afloat again.
All that needed to be done to get me off this hell hole was to put everything back into the boat and head back to get my boat back on the trailer and drive back home.
It has taken me 3 days of soaking all of my camping equipment in freshwater and drying it all out. The boat was full of sand, the tent and tarps were full of sand...everything was full of sand and salt.
I had 2 days of photography out of a planned 4 or 5 days but did manage to get a few good images in spite of that Storm from Hell.
So...if you ever wonder what professional photographers go through to get those beautiful images you see in magazines, well, now you have at least one idea of what actually goes on in capturing those images.
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