I'M IN TROUBLE.
Making use of their overwhelming numbers since my arrival on shore, the Mosquito Air Corps had launched ceaseless squadrons against the bulwark of my smelly, toxic, DNA-dissolving insect repellent. Now, two hours into my incursion, the needle noses are breaking through.
The heavily wooded and spider-infested trail I’m struggling to follow has vanished. I have less than 60 minutes to get back to the boat.
Yeah, I’m in trouble.
Welcome to Cayo Costa.
How did I end up here?
A SHORT HISTORY
I have lived in Charlotte County off-and-on for more than 25 years and have seen much of Charlotte Harbor in that time, save one lonely little island south of Boca Grande. It has served as the Gulf Coast-facing windshield for hurricanes to splatter against whenever they made a hard right turn toward the harbor.
Depending on when you want to start the clock, Cayo Costa has been populated, albeit sparsely, for hundreds of years. The Calusa — a resourceful and fierce people — lived on the island because the fishing was good and the trade opportunities were even better until the Spanish — a disease-carrying and heavily armed people — arrived in their big, flammable boats.
The Spaniards sniffled and sneezed and shot the Calusas off the island, but not before the home team took down Ponce de Leon. Cuban Ranchos took up the trade, sending stacks of salted fish to Havana. By the 1860s, the Americans arrived and started shooting at each other while mining phosphate and, eventually, making ice, which rendered the centuries-old salting techniques obsolete.
The Americans sent North Carolinians to the island (weird, but true) and took the fish for themselves. Those few Cubans and Spaniards who stuck around turned to other goods and services. Their most popular item was a bootleg beverage called aquardiente, which loosely translated into either “hot water” or “fire water” depending on the local Spanish vernacular, and thus they ran afoul of the law.
Before Cayo Costa turned into the Wild West, Boca Grande simply became a better place to live. Just like that, everyone left.
To this day, only a scant few live on the island and few of them live there year-round, for the island can only be reached by boat. The northern part of the island became a state park and it is there I traveled on a sunny, steamy Tuesday this past week.
Oddly enough, while I was slipping in the mud and the bugs were leaching my blood, I thought to myself, “I need to come here more often.”
THE HELEN M
Early Tuesday morning at Fishermen’s Village in Punta Gorda, Ricky, Brad and Brenda welcomed me and roughly two dozen other souls aboard the Helen M, a ship of the King Fisher Fleet. Three times a week, a King Fisher ship offers an entertaining, music-laden voyage to the barrier islands of Cabbage Key and Cayo Costa.
Half of Tuesday’s crowd was in search of Cabbage Key’s famous “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which may or may not have inspired a certain Jimmy Buffet song. The rest were hoping to stroll along Cayo Costa’s long, lonely beaches and swim in the warm, inviting Gulf.
Then there was me, the Intrepid Seeker of Knowledge, who boldly planned to cover the state park’s six-plus miles of trails in one, brief afternoon. After Ricky deftly piloted the Helen M into the dock at the park’s bayside entrance, a tram to the Gulf side took care of the first mile or so of my adventure, lazily pulling us along shady trail through the island’s heart.
When the tram broke through the cover, Cayo Costa’s sun-splashed beach blinded us until the Gulf’s blue-green waters restored our vision. The beachcombers broke for their bliss while I turned north along the Gulf Beach Trail, past a dozen or so rustic rental cabins populated by a hardy group of campers unencumbered by the lack of electricity and high-speed internet.
An aside: It was in these cabins that a writer named Elia Chepaitis wrote a rather entertaining 2018 novel called “The Murders on Cayo Costa.” The Amazon blurb describes it as “a thriller, a romance, and an adventure story set in the Florida Keys, in the Everglades, and on a magnificent barrier island in the Calusa Blueway near Sanibel and Captiva. Eighteen campers settle into their primitive cabins and, within twenty-four hours, a killing spree begins.”
Past the cabins, my only companions were the occasional butterfly and various unseen-but-heard lizards and small mammals scurrying through the underbrush. Prickly pears and sea grapes, heavy with fruit, were plentiful. In the occasional clearing rose an Indian Mound to remind one of the island’s original guardians.
Gulf Beach Trail emptied out at the north end of the primary beach where a snorkeling foursome was surprised to see me emerge from the wilderness. One of the men asked where I came from.
“Kansas, originally,” I said.
“No,” the man said, pointing behind me. “Where did you come from?”
I told him about the trail. Turns out he had been coming to Cayo Costa off-and-on for years via boat and never realized the state park was there. He figured it was an off-limits preserve.
“The trails are pretty terrific,” I said. “You ought to give ‘em a try some time.”
“Nah,” he said, pulling his snorkel into position. “Nice to meet you.”
Back to my lonely journey.
THE PADILLA TRAIL
Tariva Padilla and his family were one of the island’s greatest success stories, until they weren’t, then were again. Whether his name was spelled Tariva, Taribio or Tervio, he went by “Captain Pappy” and originally hailed from the Canary Islands.
He earned his citizenship in Key West in 1862, according to historian Charles Dana Gibson and his book, “Boca Grande: A Series of Historical Essays.”
Padilla arrived at Cayo Costa sometime thereafter. He established a small fishing community and his small family became a large one that sang and danced and lived and loved whenever they weren’t fishing and salting and shipping.
At the time, the northern end of Cayo Costa was an American military installation that served as a quarantine station for immigrants and refugees. The Padillas were technically squatters, but the military had other priorities and it didn’t hurt that Captain Pappy could occasionally provide aquardiente to the sullen, homesick servicemen.
It was the aquardiente that — perhaps apocryphally — did Padilla in. In 1901 when a new officer discovered Padilla’s operation dabbled in more than fish, the community was cleared and Padilla was banished.
The clan didn’t stay away for long and Padilla would live out the rest of his days further south on the island, all the while continuing to sing and dance and share his “fire water” with all.
The Padilla Trail picks up about three-quarters of a mile north of Gulf Beach Trail’s end. The trail is a short, quarter-mile hike through dense cover that ends on a dune overlooking a secluded beach. Two trail bikes were parked at the dune’s crest, but their riders were nowhere in sight. A long-dead tree served as a sentinel just offshore from the shell-encrusted sand.
It was paradise found. A vision that will stay with me for years to come.
Of course, that’s also where my journey took a wrong turn.
A GRAVE SITUATION
The head of the Dolphin Trail began just around the corner from Padilla’s little slice of paradise, near the extreme northwest end of the island. Right away, I knew I was in trouble.
Tropical Storm Elsa’s close pass had wiped out the beach, so I had to move inland. Fallen palm fronds and pine branches piled high and whenever my foot found the ground, slick mud threatened to take me down. Crab spiders and other eight-legged species lost a lot of silk to the weird, flailing hominid that ran through them, slapping and cursing.
I was good and lost. Checking my watch, I had just one hour remaining before the Helen M would pull away from dock and leave me stranded until Thursday. Or, heck, maybe I’d never get out of here and my bones, picked clean by the unseen critters, would become just another island mystery.
Eventually, I picked up the trail near the old quarantine dock on the northeast side of the island, turned to the south and my education began in earnest. The 0.79-mile Quarantine Trail passes by Burrough’s Ranch, Dead Man’s Cove and Tariva’s Bayou, but the entire stretch is now known as Pelican Bay.
It is here in 1910 the island suffered its most significant loss of life. According to Gibson, a few dozen Cuban fishermen and skippers sought shelter just offshore from Tariva’s Bayou during an approaching hurricane. When the winds shifted and their position became exposed, they decided to abandon Cayo Costa and make a run for Bokeelia to the south. Their smacks (a type of boat) were fully exposed by their misjudgment, and the vessels broke up, drowning all but one boy.
When their bodies washed up in the Bayou, the locals renamed it “Dead Man’s Cove” and buried the bodies where they lay. The exact location has been lost to time and the shifting sands may have either washed the graves out to sea or backfilled their location and moved them inland. The quiet, dense flora of Quarantine Trail gives one the sense of walking over their graves.
In the silence, I turned back to nearby Scrub Trail and headed toward the heart of the island to view a less eerie resting place.
When a rare ray of sunlight broke through the canopy, I lifted my hand to shield my eyes and found it covered in mosquitoes. I slapped my hand and something large and unseen bolted away under cover of brush.
Yeah, time to scram.
BACK TO SHORE
From the Scrub Trail, I picked up Cemetery Trail and turned south. After a half-mile or so, I came across a small, proper collection of tombstones known as the Old Pioneer Cemetery. The most famous of the buried is a Captain Peter Nelson, a well-known pilot who helped navigate ships through the Boca Grande Pass into the harbor, among his other pursuits.
Soon, I was back on the tram path and at the dock just as the tram pulled up with a load of happy, sunburned and slightly buzzed beach-goers.
The Helen M, with Ricky at the wheel, pulled up while blasting Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
I love Metallica. I flunked many a college course to the beat of Lars Ulrich’s drums.
On board, a woman slightly my elder who was also enjoying the music asked Ricky the name of the Spotify channel he was he was playing. Ricky said a kid had picked it out and it was called “classic rock.”
The Helen M was under way before I could ruminate too deeply on the fact Gen-Z considers the Metallica headbangers of my youth to be “old-timey” music for the gray-haired, baggy-eyed set.
Enjoying the breeze and resting in the sunlight of the Helen M’s open-air second deck, I spotted a pod of dolphins leaping through the water. They charged toward us head-on, like a cetacean remake of “The Magnificent Seven.” The dolphins shot under the boat, then popped up on both sides and escorted us home.
I have thought about Cayo Costa every day since.
As soon as I can, Captain Pappy’s ghost as my witness, I’m going back.
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