Echoes of Deep Summer

When deep summer arrives and settles upon the Collier County coastal islands, untold tales are waiting within the miracles and mysteries of a unique weather system. The weather engine of August differs from early summer. Veteran forecasters and meteorologists will often admit to finding difficulty in predicting late summer forecasts. A daily forecast during August can never truly describe the when and where of a mild tropical afternoon, or when fair winds and sun showers might transform into a severe thunderstorm with reoccurring nightmares and persistent echoes.

After midnight during a deep summer in August, the air over the Ten Thousand Islands is thick, unmoving, and heavy with humidity. With the dawn, the rising sun becomes a trigger for an immediate atmospheric action. As the sun rises, the temperature at ground level rises at an incredible rate. Sultry and moisture-rich air that has been lingering overnight rapidly heats and rises like the air in a hot air balloon. The humid air quickly begins to climb over the vast expanse of the Florida peninsula and especially over the lush vegetation of the Everglades. This reactionary heating of rising air is unstoppable - especially in August.

By late morning and early afternoon, the heat and humidity of the ground-level atmosphere rises to a height pilots and airliners will not dare challenge. As the rising air gains altitude, it cools two degrees with every thousand feet of elevation. As the humid moisture condenses in the lofty heights and near-freezing temperatures, clouds form and become infant thunderstorms. As the moving atmosphere creates friction within the rising water vapor, electrical charges begin to gather, strengthen, and polarize. When the height of a subtropical thunderstorm reaches over 50,000 feet, the elements of lighting are in place and ready to explode from the stratosphere. 

Well before the days when modern Marco was young and creative, development for Florida was only a fledgling idea the long, hot, and mosquito-filled days of summer were only for the most steadfast and fearless pioneers. Daily life in the tropics without air-conditioning was an aspect of summer few wanted to imagine, but when a stubborn gaggle of the older pioneers began to suggest that lightning arcing down from the sky might be predictable at specific places, many newcomers began to consider that idea was as inconceivable as witchcraft.

However, during the time when coastal sailors were working the outposts and trading between the forts and the deep-water ports of Florida and the Caribbean, a notation in a captain’s log might be the only saving grace to protect pioneers and explorers from dangers in the past that still have echoes, and perhaps dangers for the present and the future.

A popular sailing route for the early mariners was the watercourse between Tampa, Key West, and Havana. Sailors would ferry cattle from the cowboys in central Florida to the bustling port of Havana. In Cuba, the coastal trading schooners would load cargoes of rum, cigars, sugarcane, and bananas. At only 90 miles north of Havana, Key West was a thriving market and a deep-water port for larger vessels and robust commerce— - especially for rum and cigars. During the voyages, when deep summer was heavy over the Gulf and the Ten Thousand Islands, a lightning strike on a small ship could be the end of everything. This fearsome force drove sailing captains to take meticulous notations whenever lightning strikes began to appear constantly in the same places. The echoing locations of these repeated lightning strikes were the places where the sea would boil and the sand would melt. For the prudent sailors, the precise recordings of these echoes of disaster were not to be the subjects of ridicule.

An old proverb laments, “Lighting will never strike twice in the same place,”but when sailors on a trading vessel depended on experience to be the ultimate guide for safety, old proverbs, and fireplace stories were often regarded as rubbish - particularly when lighting was striking much more than twice in the very same place.

The port of Tampa in deep summer has always been a harbor of terror for coastal sailors. Many believe “Tampa” derives from an old Calusa and Native American word that translates as “sticks of fire.” The repetition of lightning strikes near Tampa Bay remains legendary.

In the Old Bahama Channel, an antiquated and superstitious notation on a nautical chart marks the beginning of the Bermuda Triangle and a deep-water ravine where the uncanny frequency of lightning strikes is a dangerous phenomenon that mariners will avoid.

Sailors traveling between Key West and Tampa have often made menacing remarks about frequent lighting striking the water at a specific point near the Cape Romano Shoals. Rumors of shipwrecked Spanish treasure ships have haunted the shoals south of Marco for as long as anyone has stood on the big crescent beach and watched the lighting assault the islands to the south. Another shipwreck tale offers the story of a pirate ship resting under the sand on Marco Beach with 100,000 silver Mexican pesos. This urban legend of pirates and treasure also speaks of the enslaved forced to mine the silver and their ghosts haunting a treasure where lighting has struck many more times than once. 

During the construction of the hundred miles of seawalls and fabricated canals on Marco, survey crews venturing into the mangroves were facing a daunting task. Clouds of mosquitos, hornet nests, and snakes were a daily encounter, but the danger of repeated lighting strikes drawn to the same location during rainy season was enough to keep even the most tenacious of the construction crews away from the strange but perhaps haunting echoes of a deep summer in the tropics.