This is a story about three islands in Florida. Now, before we get too deeply into this, understand that two of the islands are kind of novelties, and one of those two is essentially a real estate development. They’re not for everybody–which is just as well, because they don’t want all of you anyway.
As for the third island: Both George Bushes have slept there. Even if you don’t like one or both Bushes, there’s a real good chance you’ll like their choice of rest stop.
The names of the islands are Cabbage Key, Useppa Island and Gasparilla Island. You can drive to Gasparilla. You’ll need a boat to get to Cabbage Key. You’ll need a boat or a helicopter, and express written permission, to set foot on Useppa.
All are off the coast west of Ft. Myers and not too far from Sanibel and Captiva Islands. In fact, Captiva is base for day-trips to Cabbage Key and Useppa Island via Captiva Cruises; that’s how we saw them, and we’ll talk about them first.
The trips ($27.50 per person, less with coupons available in just about every free local publication) are pleasant boat rides, one island per ride. You get time on the islands for lunch and not much else. These mini-trips are especially popular with groups (retirement communities famously enjoy group excursions) and with people from shell-intense Sanibel-Captiva desperate for something to do that doesn’t involve hunting for that perfect Fasciolaria tulipa Linneaus.
The ride on Pine Island Sound takes about an hour each way (Cabbage and Useppa are neighbors), and there’s more than water along the route, which becomes evident minutes into the sound.
“We have dolphins off the port side,” said Capt. James Burke, who was narrating instead of steering the good ship Lady Chadwick on this particular voyage. “If we hoot, holler, clap, whistle, they’ll put on a show for us . . .”
People hooted. They hollered. They clapped. They whistled. The dolphins, whether they heard the people or not, did what dolphins do: They jumped.
“We have one of the largest concentrations of bottlenose dolphins in the world,” said Burke, who then pointed out a nesting osprey on a channel marker. “We’ll see chicks in a couple of months, and by June, the chicks will be as big as the parents . . .”
A passenger shrieked. Burke followed the shriek, then once more clicked on his wireless mike.
“We have dolphin right in front of the boat . . .” More hooting. More hollering. More jumping.
Several dolphins later, the boat motored alongside the dock on Cabbage Key.
So let’s do Cabbage Key. It won’t take long.
“There’s not a whole lot to do,” said Diane Pike, who answers one of the island’s few telephones, books its six rooms and seven rental cottages, cleans its six rooms and seven rental cottages, sells souvenirs and fights a never-ending battle to keep cute but incontinent ducks from waddling into her shop.
“It’s a quiet little island.”
Just about always has been.
“Cabbage Key used to be the home of [mystery novelist] Mary Roberts Rinehart,” Burke said during a quiet interlude. “She actually bought the island for her son, Alan.”
Rinehart paid $2,500 for the 100-acre dot in 1929. The house they built in 1938 is now the Cabbage Key Inn and Restaurant.
“A couple of years ago, I had Alan’s college roommate on this boat,” Burke said. “He had been on the island with Alan when Mary was here. He came back that day–he was probably in his 90s–and he said, `You know, this island isn’t a lot different than it was when I was here as a young man.’
“It’s Old Florida. Very Old Florida.”
The inn’s restaurant and bar–which is the main draw–is locally famous for a few things. For one, the walls and ceiling are covered with thousands of signed dollar bills (and at least one Irish 5-pound note). That’s a throwback to the days when thirsty and temporarily flush commercial fishermen would hammer up a few extra bills–identified by signature, of course–so on days when they were thirsty and unflush, a cash reserve was handy.
The inn’s reputation as a hangout (or, at least, a stop) for the Rich and Famous is also a lure.
“I know Julia Roberts comes here,” said Pike, “and I hear Tom Cruise likes to come here.” They weren’t around when I was on the island. Neither was Hemingway. Neither were Marlo Thomas and Phil Donahue, but that was just bad luck. “Marlo Thomas,” said Pike, “looks just the way she looked on `That Girl.'”
“Everybody comes here,” said Terry Forgie, who, “for 23 years, something like that,” has been known on Cabbage only as Terry the Dockmaster.
“I used to get dollar bills from everybody, about the time Katharine Hepburn and Walter Cronkite and those people were coming here.”
Terry the Dockmaster, by the way, is an interesting guy. He’s 70 and looks 45, which is a strong endorsement of dockmasting.
“I grew up Scotch and Irish [near Toronto], but I thought I was an Indian,” he said. “I called myself `Hawkeye’ and so forth. I believe that I lived here a long time previously, and that I’ve come home.
“All these years, I’ve never lost that feeling. I believe I’m where I should be, doing exactly what I should be doing.”
What some people should be doing, he said, is coming to Cabbage Island.
“When you’re here — Back ‘er up, Cap. It’ll fit right in there. — when you’re here, you have a good time,” he said while managing to keep boats worth $500,000 or more from slamming into parked ones worth twice that. “Drink and eat. Sleep. Fish. Go away–Right around, Cap. Whoa!–go away and come back again.
“You sit on the island and do nothing. A couple of days of reading and just saying to hell with everything. Some people are ready for that.”
And there’s the cheeseburger thing. Jimmy Buffet, whose signed dollar bill is framed and mounted safely behind the bar’s register, supposedly wrote “Cheeseburgers in Paradise” (which is a song, not a Good Eating cover story) after a visit.
“It’s true,” said Pike, the versatile one. “He stopped here, had a cheeseburger, and as he was leaving was inspired to write it.”
It might be true.
“They like to claim that it was written about the cheeseburgers here,” said Terry the Dockmaster. “Hundreds of restaurants make the same claim. But they are sort of noted for their cheeseburgers here.”
So I ordered one. It arrived without the cheese.
“I can take it back,” said the waiter, who obviously didn’t want to. The cheeseless cheeseburger was OK. The Corona was perfect. It was cold.
What else is here? There’s a short nature trail. There’s a water tower, but the view from the top isn’t dreamy. There are mosquitoes. (Spray is provided, free, at the dock; the Coronas, you pay for.) There are some Indian mounds, one of them supposedly beneath the Cabbage Key Inn and Restaurant. Great fishing, as there is everywhere around here.
Terry the Dockmaster rents boats ($55 a day), which aren’t really intended for fishing but can take you to the other side of the island, the beach side. “They aren’t the white sand like up in the Panhandle, but they’re natural looking,” said the Dockmaster.
And that’s about it for Cabbage Key. But there are times when a lot of us are ready for Cabbage Key . . .
On to Useppa Island.
The Spanish called it Josefa Island beginning in the 1700s, after their unfriendly takeover from the Calusa Indians, who evidently ran someone else off the island thousands of years earlier. The Calusa, naturally, called the place Toampe. The island later was a U.S. fort, a Union spy base during the Civil War, then an obscure fishing camp.
A succession of names and owners followed. John Roach, a Chicagoan who made his fortune in the streetcar business, owned it for a bit and called it Josepha. Barron Collier–who sold the ads that appeared on Roach’s streetcars–bought it from Roach in 1911, renamed it Useppa (which, to his ear, sounded less objectionably foreign than Josepha), built an inn (today’s Collier Inn came a little later) and hosted the usual Roosevelts, DuPonts and Rockefellers.
Collier, for a time Florida’s largest landowner, died in 1939, and the island has had its ups and downs ever since. One up, sort of: In 1960, the CIA took over the old inn and used it as a base for planning the Bay of Pigs operation. The invasion flopped, of course, like a lot of things on Useppa Island.
Today, seen on another day-excursion via the Lady Chadwick, it appears to be a very nice housing development and private club.
Along with a private regulation croquet court and a private artificial beach, there are 106 private homes on Useppa Island. A cottage on the island just sold for $4.3 million, but before you stash your checkbook, you should know that another was on the market during my visit for only about half that. If you want to build your own, two lots recently were being offered at a mere $950,000 each.
Don’t just drop in
They take privacy seriously here. If you cruise in for lunch or a daiquiri at the Collier Inn on your own yacht, or your own kayak, without a formal invitation?
“If you take your own boat,” said Wayne Nofzinger, bartender aboard the Lady Chadwick and former mayor of Stryker, Ohio, which is not private, “they’ll turn you away.”
So. You’re welcome on the authorized Captiva Cruises day-trips. You can also rent a very few of the cottages, at variable rates. You can stay overnight at the 13-room Collier Inn (rates: $170-$395, depending on date and accommodation), or, for a fee plus dues, become a non-resident member of the Useppa Island Club.
Otherwise, keep out.
There’s a little museum on the island that isn’t bad for filling a few minutes. Some Bay of Pigs participants’ clothing is featured, along with recovered Indian artifacts. And while on your day-trip, you’re of course free to walk along a prescribed landscaped trail among some of the cottages, provided you don’t touch anything and never, ever leave the prescribed trail.
“Some of the older houses here date back to the 1920s,” said guide Linda Ballou. And the soft pitch. “If anybody’s interested in buying a house on Useppa, there are a few places available.”
Lunch was pretty good. It’s a nice place to live. I guess.
Finally, and at last, there’s Gasparilla Island.
As the story goes, the name “Gasparilla” has something to do with a pirate named Jose Gaspar, who, among other dastardly deeds, was said to have kidnapped Spanish officials and held them captive on a nearby island that came to be known as (pause for dramatic effect) Captiva.
It’s a story, said Hal Theiss, a naturalist and retired NASA veteran (ask him about the movie “Apollo 13”) who narrates some of the Captiva excursions. In truth, he said, though pirates did use the island as a base, Spanish records say Gasparilla was named for a certain Friar Gaspar, who started a mission on the island. “But,” said Theiss, “it’s not as glamorous a story.”
If Gasparilla doesn’t ring a bell, maybe “Boca Grande” will. That’s the island’s only town since a “Gasparilla Village” was plowed under by developers in the 1950s. People generally call the whole thing “Boca,” which not only saves keystrokes but keeps anyone from putting an “ay” at the end of Grand.
“People who aren’t from here try to add the Spanish accent to it,” said Debbi Ricci of the Boca Grande Area Chamber of Commerce. “That’s how you can tell they’re not a local.”
President Bush, the current one, spent his president-elect Christmas here with family that included brothers Jeb, Neil, Marvin and their dad, the first President Bush. (He was back in Texas for the 2001 holidays.) The father’s first trip to Boca was after his 1992 defeat for re-election by Bill Clinton, who, as far as we know, has never stayed here at all.
For the Bushes, there was golf, and there was fishing, and there was whatever all families do when they get together.
“They stay right up there at the Gasparilla Inn,” said Bill Walters, who oversees Millers Marina and Bill’s Fish Market. “George Senior, he fishes right over in here. I let him fish off the dock.
“You know, most people think it’s a problem when they’re here, but it’s really not a bother at all.”
Which seems to be the consensus.
“They’ve not eaten here so far, but they’ve been in, to buy package and stuff like that,” said Jim Grace, who with wife Karen owns the Temptation–“The Temp”–a restaurant and bar that’s a Boca institution. “I’ve met them. They’re very nice people.”
The island is 7 miles long and a half-mile wide. Overnight visitors who haven’t arranged for a condo or rental house, and most visitors do, can stay at one of the two motels, a two-unit inn or in the rooms and cottages of the Gasparilla Inn, built by old Barron Collier, which dates to 1912 and has a golf course as well as a certain air of–well, a certain air.
“Typically,” said a desk clerk there, “we don’t like to be written about.”
Oh.
But don’t get the idea that all Boca Grande is some sort of stuffy, self-important, exclusionary retreat for the super-rich, though there is some of that heritage here.
“Trains used to come down from Philadelphia with the Harrimans and the Rockefellers and the DuPonts and whatever,” said Ricci, “because this was kind of their winter home.”
“It’s very expensive,” said Brian Troutman of Wilmette, who is no Rockefeller but nonetheless has been coming here for 17 years. “Very expensive. Guys will come in and pay $3.5 million for a house on the Gulf and tear it down.”
Yet there is an Old Florida informality here that links it less to the opulent mansions of Newport, R.I., than to the island’s history–dating at least back to the Spanish–of being a great place to fish, and relax, with family and friends and whomever happens to be having a beer that night at The Temp.
“It’s just a laid-back island,” Grace said. “There’s a lot of day-trippers here.”
“We have people come from all over,” said Walters. “They’re not in the financial class that most of the people in Boca Grande are, but that has nothing to do with the fishing. Nothing whatsoever. A day of fishing is a day of fishing.”
Or a day at the beach. The Gulf beach, natural and gorgeous, runs much of the island’s length, more than a mile of it protected as part of Gasparilla Island State Recreation Area and open to all, with just enough parking.
Also here: an 1890 lighthouse, restored and converted into a museum; Fugate’s, a mercantile store that dates to 1916; PJ’s Seagrille, a restaurant housed in a former 1920s movie house where the Vanderbilts and Morgans would come, dressed in formal gear, by limo; a street lined by banyan trees; bike paths; galleries and community theater and–in season (mid-April through mid-July)–the best tarpon fishing in the world.
Two groceries. One gas station. No franchises. Year-round population of maybe 800 (swelling to about 12,000 in high season, which it can handle). No high-rises. Aside from $250,000 in prizes during the annual World’s Richest Tarpon Tournament, no pressure.
Said Ricci, summing it up: “It’s like Sanibel 20 years ago,”
“I love the beach,” said Troutman. “I could just sit on the beach eight hours a day. Or fish, read a book, drink some beer and call it a day.
“It’s kind of a special little place.”
Then he remembered I was taking notes.
“Tell the people,” he said, ” `If they want to have fun, stay on Sanibel.'”
No.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
Closest full-service airport to Gasparilla Island/Boca Grande and embarkation docks to Useppa Island and Cabbage Key (primarily Captiva and Pine Islands) is the one at Ft. Myers. Cut-price Spirit Airlines recently was offering non-stops from O’Hare for $171; American and United had non-stop fares as low as $183 (all subject to change). Florida airfares are notoriously changeable, seasonal and competitive. If those flights are unavailable, airports in Sarasota and Tampa are within two hours by car; the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale airports are only a little farther.
Gasparilla Island is the only one of the three reachable by car. Figure an hour or more from Ft. Myers, a little longer from Sarasota and two hours from Sanibel Island. None of the drives is scenic. Captiva Cruises, which had been running frequent boat shuttles (90 minutes each way, from Captiva Island; $35 round trip) to Boca Grande in season, has cut them back to maybe once a month; for schedules, call 941-472-5300 or check www.captivacruises.com on the Web.
Cabbage Key can be reached either by hopping the daily Captiva Cruises shuttle ($27.50 round trip) or water taxi ($25) from Captiva Island, or by arranging transportation at Pine Island, either through the Cabbage Key Inn or on your own (prices vary). If you’re arriving by your own boat, dockage is available for a fee.
Useppa Island can be reached by the same Captiva Cruises boat (same price, Tuesdays through Sundays only), but unless you have pre-arranged lodging or you’re a member of the island’s private club, you’ll be taking the next boat back to Captiva two hours later. Likewise, your own boat will be turned away unless you have made special arrangements. Same goes for your own helicopter. The Useppa Island Club/Collier Inn also can arrange boat connections from Pine Island ($13 per guest each way; 941-283-1061) for the connected.
GETTING AROUND
Cabbage Key is compact enough to walk. Small boats can be rented at the dock for exploring the far side of the island. Useppa is also walkable; the inn’s fleet of golf carts and bikes can get you around if you’d rather ride.
A car can be handy for exploring Gasparilla, but concessions will rent golf carts and bicycles as well–which better match the island’s relaxed pace–at nominal rates.
WHERE TO STAY
At Useppa, it’s the Collier Inn, unless you arrange to rent (or buy) one of the island’s apartments, cottages or homes. Weekday rates at the inn start at $170, suites at $190 in its low season (Jan. 2 through Feb. 8); cottages in high season (Feb. 9 through March 31) can be had for as little as $2,472 weekly; a four-bedroom home can be yours for the same week at a mere $4,770. 888-735-6335
On Cabbage Key, rooms in the Cabbage Key Inn go for $89 a night; cottages start at $145, $189 with kitchen. 941-283-2278.
Gasparilla Island/Boca Grande has more options. A double room (including three meals) at the historic Gasparilla Inn will set you back $422 (for two) a night, more if you want a lanai, but dips a bit after April 1. 941-964-2201. Simpler motel rooms elsewhere go for as little as $135 (double) in high season. Try Uncle Henry’s Marina Resort (941-964-2300) or The Innlet (941-964-2294). Condo prices vary widely by season and luxury level; a scan of highest-season listings found two-bedroom condos for as little as $1,400 weekly and three-bedrooms for as high as $3,400. The Chamber of Commerce (941-964-0568) can help.
ONE RUSTIC ALTERNATIVE
Cayo Costa State Park, just across the water from Gasparilla. Primitive camping (tents) or primitive cabins (wood). As close to a pristine Gulf barrier island as there is. Access is by various ferries. Information: Gasparilla Island State Recreation Area, 941-964-0375
INFORMATION
Cabbage Key: 941-283-2278; www.cabbage-key.com. Useppa Island: 888-735-6335; www.useppaislandclub.com. Gasparilla Island/Boca Grande (including fishing charters): 941-964-0568; www.bocagrandechamber.com.
— Alan Solomon
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e-mail Alan Solomon: alsolly@aol.com
