On Tuesday, I joined Charlie to go to a Shrimp Boat landing just before the final bridge to Ft Myers Beach. Charlie bearing his canvas and paints: I, my camera.
As we drove to this quiet place, we went from the super hyped tourist area to the working class area. Suddenly, after a few twists and turns, we ended up in a small area where the main business is shrimp: harvesting, processing and shipping.
As with most marinas, there are 'throw aways'. This Pepsi dispenser was just stored beside large, old, motorized winches that likely served their owners well in hauling their fishing nets in.
That's Charlie on the far right, already set up to do his painting.
I found old rusty winches interesting and here are a few pictures of the colourful rust that I found.
Even the old cables that hauled the fishing nets had interesting colours.
Next is Charlie just starting to sketch what he sees.
Here is close-up of one of those very powerful winches. The winch sidewall had very interesting and colourful rust patterns.
This is the blunt un-interpreted view that Charlie was painting.
Shrimp boats have very specialized and interesting fishing equipment. Unfortunately, this equipment scrapes the bottom of the sea bed, and is not environmentally friendly, but the shrimp is so tasty...
Apparently these boats leave the harbour with two men as crew, with rations for a month or more. They go where the shrimp are thought to be: some boats will go as far as NFLD to fill their hold.
Here are shots of some of their gear.
Some marinas contain a field of broken dreams, [old boats that owners desperately try to rebuild or fix], this one had some old equipment just standing there, not necessarily abandoned, but not necessarily in service either. This wheel still held up a useable trailer tanker, but suffered the indignities of the local dog...
Here is Charlie a couple of hours later: the painting is almost completed. One of the local workers stopped his huge piece of machinery, walked over to examined the work in progress, and stared at it for quite a while. His first word were: you have been doing this for a very long time, haven't you.
One would not expect a dockworker to have an appreciation of fine art. We often assume that some groups are this or that. Every person we meet is an individual, with his/her own life experience that brought them to the person we meet today. That may have nothing to do with their training, their tastes, or their feelings. I think we all need to be reminded not to presume. ...often...
This is the underside of a aluminium pontoon that was cleaned of its accumulated barnacles, in preparation for installing a fibreglass membrane to make it leakproof. I just thought that the play of light made for an interesting pattern.
This marina caters to shrimp boats. The boats return with a hold of shrimp that is then processed, frozen, and packed in these 5'X5' [I think] pallets, then moved to a refrigerated truck with a powerful forklift. There are more shrimp in this picture than I could possibly eat in a month of Sundays...
At the far side of the marina was this storage shed for smaller pleasure boats.
This is just one side of this 4 story facility.
Next is the awesome, huge, and powerful 'front end loader' that parks and removes the boats from the building.
Today, being Wednesday, Joan and I went to the Ding Darling Wildlife reserve, where our friends Phyllis and Dave are Docents for the weekly drive through.
This weekly event is always filled with surprises and much laughter. Today we welcomed Richard who is a phenomenal birder and photographer, from upper state NY. His neighbours Chris and Bruce were also there, as well as Dr Bart the ultimate authority on bird identification.
Now shore birds are numerous and often similar in size, colouring, etc. Their identification is often [if not always] difficult. A batch of a few dozen shorebirds showed up and caused some identification differences.
These long term, great friends came to different conclusions: oh dear, what to do. Eventually, each side found evidence that they were both right: there were samples of each genus in the bunch of brown shorebird they were looking at...
Meanwhile, I just marvelled at these white pelicans fishing off the bottom, which I didn't think they did. [I have a lot to learn...] Either way, these guys were fishing together to scare stuff from the bottom so one of them could snag a snack.
After leaving Ding Darling, we went to a nearby restaurant that serves small bowls of vegetarian / vegan food which tastes very good and is very filling and likely good for you...
As we left the counter where they created our bowls, the owner said there was a Screech Owl just under the balcony roof.
These are small 8" owls that sleep most of the day. I think this one slept with his eyes open...
I suspect he might also be a red morph of a Screech Owl, but, what do I know...
Serendipity, the blessing for those who look. Enjoy!
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