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January 20, 2002
By Betsy Clayton, Staff
News-Press Newspaper
Cayo Costa is a sliver of an island that lies on the Gulf of Mexico's edge northwest of Fort Myers.
It may as well be half a world away.
Think Robinson Crusoe.
Cayo Costa stretches from Boca Grande Pass to Captiva Pass for seven lush, subtropical miles.
It's sandwiched between million-dollar waterfront homes on the tony islands of Useppa and Gasparilla. It's just north of the rustic-but-rich North Captiva.
But it only costs $1 to visit the state park at Cayo Costa's north end.
Beaches are wide and empty enough that walkers can write their names in the sand as big as skywriters do in the air.
Campgrounds teem with sounds of creatures. Great horned owls hoot from branches that frame a full moon bigger than anyone imagined. Woodpeckers pound at bark as if they were running a construction site.
The island is void of cars. There is no hot water. Telephones and electricity are absent. No soda or candy machines are in sight.
The Gulf hems in one side of the mile-wide island. Pine Island Sound stitches its other side into the patchwork quilt of barrier islands that make up Florida's Gulf coast.
"We found this place on the Internet when we were in Africa," said Candace Buzzard, an Oregonian who lives in Uganda.
"It's like no place I've ever been before," she said as she boarded a boat after a recent three-night camping trip.
Cayo Costa is the kind of place where the expression "Missing the boat" literally means there's no other option.
Private boats, day cruises and water taxis are the only way to reach its shores - or get off its sandy beaches once someone has had enough of paradise.
The island has remained pristine for decades. Its landscape forces time to stand still in an era of built-up coasts from Jacksonville to Miami to Pensacola.
There are no crowds here, only an overwhelming feeling among those who visit that they are completely disconnected.
Walking the beach at sunrise, placing the first footprints of the day in the sand, makes people feel like they are discovering Cayo Costa.
Thousands have "discovered" it over the years.
Calusa Indians occupied the island from about 1000 to 1763. The early 1800s brought Cuban fishermen there, and in 1848 the U.S. government started managing the land.
"Coast Island," as the Spanish translation would be, became a place for Lee County fishermen in the mid-1800s.
Families raised pigs and sent their children to school in a building that later burned. They built a new school on Punta Blanca, across the bay.
Virginia Morton of Bokeelia remembers visiting that schoolhouse when she was 6. Her cousins went there. Her great-grandfather had moved to the island about 1860, and both her grandfather and father were raised there.
"I'd like to see a museum out there," she said wistfully from her small office at Jug Creek Marina.
The place is a makeshift museum. She has a photo of her great-grandparents on Cayo Costa, a pig in the background.
Morton owns and operates the marina and a cruise business - often giving tourists and locals rides to Cayo Costa.
It was only a matter of time after the fishermen and families left in the 1950s that much of the island became public land - first in Lee County's hands and then later in the state's as well.
The state park today is 2,506 acres. Nearly all the rest of the island is owned by public agencies. About 10 percent is held by 100 different private individuals. Twenty private homes exist only two or three are lived in year-round, ranger Sally Falkinburg said.
The 70,000 park visitors each year may hardly notice.
An unassuming ranger station is all that's on the skyline when they pull into the bayside marina, which is primitive with no electric or water hookups.
The station is really a trailer on stilts. Rangers like Falkinburg, a 12-year Cayo Costa veteran, and assistant park manager Annette Nielsen live on the island in rustic cabins.
A tractor that tows a platform with benches offers visitors transport on Cabin Road. The dirt road stretches from the dock to the Gulfside picnic and cabin area. Oak trees intertwine overhead. Puddles transform into wading pools for bald eagles to drink and splash. Spanish moss drips from oaks and palms. Vines creep up old stumps.
Halfway across the island, a low-to-the-ground sign points to a pioneer cemetery. Down the sugar-sand trail, a fenced-off area serves as a tribute to early settlers and kin of people like Morton.
"After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well," reads the headstone on Capt. Peter Nelson's grave. He died Sept. 7, 1919, at age 80. He had already founded and named Alva, a small community east of Fort Myers on the Caloosahatchee River. He's also the only one laid to rest there who Morton is not related to.
Weathered conch and whelk shells form borders to the graves. The trails from there wend north to Quarantine Point and Boca Grande Pass.
CAYO COSTA
The nationally acclaimed island park is nearly seven miles long and a mile wide on the Gulf of Mexico. Visitors pay $1 at the park entrances - the island's north end on both bay side and Gulf side.
Hiking/bicycling: More than five miles of trails through forest and scrub and past an old cemetery. >From song birds to 100-pound pigs, wildlife sightings are frequent. Trail use is free with park admission. Bicycle rentals are $8 half-day and $16 for 24 hours at the ranger station.
Camping: Tent sites and 12 rustic cabins are available by reservation. No hot water or electricity is provided.
Beaches: Pristine beaches offer miles of walking and shelling. A brochure identifying shells is available at the ranger station on the bay side. No live shells can be collected.
Picnicking: Tables, grills and picnic pavilions are on the Gulf side.
Fishing: Boca Grande Pass, on the north end, is well-known for late spring and summer tarpon fishing. Other fish regularly caught around the island are flounder, snook, redfish, trout, snapper, whiting and sheepshead.
Call: Cayo Costa State Park, (941) 964-0375 camping reservations, (800) 326-3521
GETTING THERE
Access to Cayo Costa is by boat only. Take your own or consider one of these outfits that are state-designated concessionaires:
Cross Cruises, Bokeelia, 283-1522
Ghostrider Cruises, Bokeelia, 283-1150
Jug Creek Cruise, Bokeelia, 283-9512
Kingfisher Cruise Line Inc., Punta Gorda, (941) 639-0969
New River Transport Inc., Boca Grande and Bokeelia, 283-6060
Tropic Star of Pine Island, Bokeelia, 283-0015
