Happy Halloween

This man and his son were spooking the shorebirds yesterday at sunset.
I thought they looked like bats.

More Far Out

Shark Fishing

     I bumped into a young man on the bridge at Bowman's Beach who was casting a net to catch mullet for shark bait.  He has yet to learn respect for the shark.  He puts the whole mullet onto his hook and casts it far out into the water.

                     
Here are some photos from a book that I edited for a friend.  He had no respect for the shark as a young man. The name of the first photo is "Biting Back".  It shows my friend with a hammerhead shark. The second photo is of a bull shark that my friend and another young man caught. They would put mullet on a hook and then row the bait out into the surf past the second sandbar.  It seems that most shark fishing takes place at night.  I don't think shark sleep but are always awake and hunting.  These photos were taken in the early 1970s.  Back then sharks were caught, killed and their jaws taken for trophies. Nowadays guys who hunt for sharks release them.

These and a great many other photos of island life from forty years ago can be seen in the book I edited called ISLAND BOY, A LITTLE SANIBEL. The author is Johnny Rocco.  You can order a copy through the McIntosh Bookstore, Periwinkle Way, Sanibel, FL 33957.  My editor's notes are on the backcover.  It is an amusing read, not very long and again filled with great photographs from the not too distant past.

It takes skill to throw one of these casting nets and it makes for a nice sunset photo!

                     

BOO!

    Ghost Crab

Far Out

Spooky Mysterious Graves

    In the small cemetery near Algiers there are spooky mysterious graves. One is a child named Baby Wiles who died in  1967. Near the grave of Rebecca L. Turner who died in 1914 at the age of 32, is a headstone that has become so worn it is no longer legible.  Perhaps Turner Beach is named after Rebecca. There is the grave of an unknown male found near the lighthouse in 1961.  Was this a drowning accident and his body washed ashore? Next to him is Gloria Johnson whose grave bears only her name and is missing dates.  Perhaps she didn't want anyone to know her true age!

Former Islanders

     For years whenever I pedaled between Casa Ybel and Algiers, I wondered about the identities of the souls eternally at rest in the small island cemetery. I made a diagram and took notes on the twelve graves. Betty Anholt's book The Sanibel Story provided most of the information I needed.


            

     One marker resembles a tree trunk engraved with the words "Woodman of the World" and "At Rest".  At the base is a small relief of a beautiful calla lily in bloom. This is the grave of Newton Rutland, born in 1892 and died in 1915.  Newton was the son of Irene and Othman Rutland.  Othman was the island's first lighthouse keeper. 

     The saddest grave to me is Yvette "Cookie" Redinger.  Born in 1951, Cookie lived only ten short years.  She had a heart defect that she never outgrew.  Her mother's name is unknown but she was thought to be Cuban. Her father, Joseph, is buried next to her.  He was a mail carrier.  He drowned in 1964, just three years after Cookie passed away and was 43 years old.

     The grave of William H. Reed indicates that he lived to be 91.  Like so many early homesteaders on Sanibel, Reed discovered the island while serving in the military as a Captain during the Civil War.  He hailed from Maine.  The Reed family included William's wife Lucy, two sons and one daughter.  Shortly after settling on Sanibel, tragedy struck when a son, Eugene Grant Reed, age 21, became hopelessly tangled in fishing paraphernalia and drowned in Tarpon Bay.  The family returned to Portland, Maine where William found work as a shoe salesman but eventually they all came back to Sanibel.  William became known as "Commodore" and socialized with a "roisterous Englishman" named Sam Ellis.  Sam lived in a rough house made of palmetto and spent much of his time drifting about on Tarpon Bay with a jug. According to a story in the Ft. Myers PRESS dated April 21, 1921 "Captain Reed dropped anchor at last and was buried in Penosbscot Bay, Maine."  Was Captain Reed's body shipped north to Penobscot Bay? Many old timers doubted that he was moved and his grave appears to be here in this family plot. For years a beautiful pink hibiscus grew between the graves of Eugene and his mother Lucy.