Two things you can count on from Southwest Florida during the summer, which is fast-approaching? First, soul-sucking heat and humidity. Second, less traffic on the streets between Interstate 75 and the small Sunshine State cities that dot the Gulf Coast.
The exception to this is Sarasota, which is just as hot as Fort Myers and Cape Coral and Naples during the summer, but never seems to get much of a break from the traffic, even when the snowbirds bail out of the state.
The exodus is as massive as it is predictable. All but a few members of the Fort Myers Offshore group, for example, are long gone, just as club leaders Tim and Cyndee Hill wanted to be last week. Yet their Skater 32B catamaran wasn’t quite ready for five months of fun on a small Indiana lake, so the Hills are still in town.
That turned out to be a good thing last Saturday as they joined their friends Jim and Kelli Agles on the Agles’ brand-new Mystic Powerboats M3800 center console. Unlike most Fort Myers Offshore members including the Hills, the Agles will be at their Southwest Florida—save for a few of road trips—all summer. Knowing the Hills will be gone until October, they invited the couple and a guest to join them on their immaculate 38-footer and head to lunch at the Green Flash restaurant on Captiva Island.
After lunch, the group ran to the tiki bar at the Westin Cape Coral Resort for a cold beverage. Their timing couldn’t have been better as a slew of other Fort Myers Offshore members decided to make the Cape Coral venue the last stop of their 2024/2025 season. Soon-to-be gone club members in the impromptu party-group included Nor-Tech 390 Sport center console owners Dan and Julie Weiss, who will be will off to Kentucky for the summer in the next week or so, MTI 390X catamaran man and general bon vivant Mikey Boyle, who is heading back to his place in the Northeast and Aron Aber of Ohio, whose Sunsation 32 CCX center console was featured in the 2025 Speed On The Water Year In Review print magazine.
It was a last, spontaneous chance for the Fort Myers Offshore faithful still in town—the stragglers if you will—to say goodbye and raise a glass. Of course, they’ll be back from their summer adventures in late September and early October with plenty of stories to tell.
Because for every Southwest Florida exodus in the spring, there is a migration back to the state come fall.—Matt Trulio