Charlotte County closed the Port Charlotte Beach Complex completely for a while in order to demolish some facilities that were slated for replacement and also to use the boat ramp area to recover derelict vessels from the harbor. The drone shot at right shows the area where the swimming pool and other buildings used to stand as of February 2025, shortly after the park reopened.
We’re working on reopening The Sailing Center but at this time we do not have a dock that is suitable for safe small boat sailing. Replacing it is apparently not high on the Charlotte County priority list. We are not sure when we can regularly go sailing again but we are restoring order to our facility in anticipation of that day.
Although general access to The Sailing Center was cut off by the closure of the park, the county did allow us in to begin recovery efforts. We refloated the Catalina 26 that was sunk and removed the diesel engine. The picture at left shows us removing the mast from that boat. Disposal of the hull is on our list of projects to complete.
Once the park was partially reopened to the public, there was still a bit of an access problem for The Sailing Center because recovery vehicles, vessels, and dumpsters were still blocking our area.
After we could actually use our gate again, the first task was to get some boats out of the way to make room to work in the yard.
We still had trash and pieces of wood tossed around by Milton to remove before mowing the lawn. The Flying Scot was not seriously damaged but had a swamp inside.
Our small boat racks were washed aside and damaged by Milton flooding, so the next task was to repair them and put them back where they belong. In the foreground is part of our Optimist Pram rack. Dennis is working on the Minifish rack. Starr dog is guarding the rebuilt Sunfish rack.
We had made some previous efforts to remove the mud from the building but finally got our chance to completely empty and mop the floor. It needs it again once we have water to the building again, but is a lot better than it was.
We put a couple dozen of our prams, Minifish, and Sunfish back on their restored racks.
Our racks are just big enough to hold our Sunfish fleet, so when someone donated a nice Sunfish it meant our oldest and most damaged one had to go. This boat was the only one with the very early bronze rudder attachment fixture and some other interesting but obsolete fittings. The only thing left to do with it was cut it up and throw it away.
The cleanup is a work in progress, as this drone photo shows. We’re working on reopening as volunteer availability permits.
