Florida’s coast by catamaran
Imagine cruising along Florida’s Gulf Coast in “a crewed, floating B&B loaded with kayaks, limes, rum, and five of your closest paddling buddies,” said Meg Lukens Noonan in National Geographic Adventure. I took a trip through the sounds south of St. Petersburg on the Mirage, a “shallow-draft, 70-foot outrigger catamaran.” The best thing about traveling this way is that your “base camp” becomes “your guide,” leading you to inlets and islands that you can paddle out to explore. Every morning, as the catamaran scudded through the barrier islands of Pine Island Sound, it dropped us off at different locations along the newly expanded Great Calusa Blueway, “a 190-mile marked canoe and kayak route.” We hung with the manatees in the “grassy fringes” of Sanibel’s J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge and got to “paddle through the chop with a posse of dolphins to the empty beaches of Cayo Costa State Park.” There was never any problem getting back to the “hotel” for dinner and a swim under the stars.
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