We have done as much as we are allowed to do to reopen the Sailing Center following the damage from hurricane Milton. Our boats are back on rebuilt racks and trailers and we have restored order to the shop, boat shed, and lawn. Volunteers continue to show up on Wednesdays and Saturdays to further clean up and maintain the place. One thing we have not done is actually put a sailboat in the water. Right now we can use a couple of our bigger boats off trailers if we want to add to crowding at the boat ramp but launching and using our Sunfish is very difficult and any disabled sailing activities are impossible until Charlotte County can restore our facility. We remain hopeful that this will happen but the county’s disaster response web page shows the Sailing Center as “complete.”

We have come a long way since hurricane Milton washed most the boats into a corner, destroying our racks, and filled the building with stinky mud. The boats are back on rebuilt racks, the building is clean and dry, and our volunteers are doing what we can using a water cube for cleaning water and generators for power. Our safety boat and our larger boats on trailers are usable but the core of our operation is teaching sailing and providing accessible sailing for those with disabilities. To do those things, we’ll need cooperation from Charlotte County. The things we need most are restoration of power, water, and a floating dock.

This picture captures our problem. At left is the hoist that we use to launch our little Sunfish and other small boats. We can still use it with one of our generators, but then we run into the problem at the middle of the picture. The floating dock was lost in Milton but the aluminum ramp remains in the water. We have asked for permission to raise it up and use it with the Sailing Center’s plastic floating dock, shown at right, but that has not been allowed.

This plastic floating dock was donated to the Sailing Center and we appreciate it but it is a good addition to our infrastructure. The previous floating dock was built by a group of volunteers when Charlotte County hosted the 2012 Disabled Sailing World Championships. Casual visitors to the park likely did not notice the holes and metal hardware at the corners of the dock sections. Those sockets hold the special davits that we use to remove a person from a wheelchair and put him in a small sailboat. We can temporarily use our plastic dock to teach kids to sail Sunfish but there is no safe way to use it to make sailing wheelchair-accessible again. We don’t just need any floating dock, we need one that is stable and has the correct hardware. If we are not allowed to remove the aluminum ramp from the water soon, we will wind up needing a new one of those too.

This is the view down the aluminum ramp in August, 2025. The picture was taken at high tide so the oysters that have grown since Milton are not visible. Astonishingly, I’m told that people have used this to launch and get into kayaks. I’m a lifelong kayaker and have launched in a few questionable situations but this is an extremely bad idea. Oyster cuts in this water are likely to become infected quickly. Where in the world people got the idea that this is a place to launch is beyond me.

Oh. Maybe that’s where the idea came from? People who are NOT lifelong kayakers might think this is just how kayakers do it. This looks like an invitation to an attractive nuisance to me. As a taxpayer, this seems like a cartoonishly bad idea.

Raising that ramp out of the water and using it with our plastic floating dock is not an ideal solution but is a much better idea than the one we are currently executing.

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.

Last summer, the Sailing Center received a Catalina 26 that had been dismasted and scuffed up in hurricane Ian. It was a promising donation with a working Yanmar diesel engine and no major damage apart from the mangled mast. We had fitted the Catalina’s old standing rigging and spreaders to a donated mast and were getting close to having a working sailboat when hurricane Helene flooded our building in September 2024. We were just getting the mud out and drying out our stuff in October when hurricane Milton flooded the whole park much worse.

The floating dock escaped its piling rows and crashed into the Catalina as it was tossed up onto the dock pilings and a piling tore a large hole in the side of the boat, sinking it. In the picture at left you can see the aluminum ramp that provided access to the floating dock just hanging in the water and one piling next to the Catalina that looks a bit battered on top. It won the fight.

With limited access to the park and the need to clean our way to our salvage tools, it took a while to assemble the people and tools needed to raise the boat. First it was lashed to the dock with come-a-longs to hold it vertical. Then our fearless leader, Dennis, went in the water with a hand drill and a thin slab of fiberglass and covered the hole. We then draped a tarp over the patch and some sails and canvas over the companionway and cockpit hatch to help seal up the boat. We fired up a 2″ trash pump and a 1 1/2″ one and gradually got most of the water out of the boat. It was still sitting low because it was filled with mud so we removed mud with buckets and then pumped water into the boat with the small pump to make a stinky slurry, which was then pumped out with the large pump.

At the end of the day, the boat was moved around to the inside of the dock to allow crews who are working on the park to use the outside again. We’re still working on what will come next. Stay tuned!

We removed the diesel engine from the boat and started to remove the mast but realized that our hull patch was leaking too badly and the boat would sink again. We used a come-a-long on the far side of the dock tied to the main halyard to heel the boat over and expose the bottom of the patch, then Dennis loosened it, stuffed the seam with butyl rubber tape, and screwed it back down with additional screws.

I hope we get our patch back! It is one of a few fiberglass cockpit covers for our 2.4mR sailboats that are rigged for disabled sailors. It happened to be just right to cover the hole left by the piling so we used it to make this repair but we should be able to remove it when the boat is out of the water, repair the screw holes, and put it back where it belongs.

The wind-driven storm surge from Hurricane Helene brought about a foot of muddy water into the Sailing Center building but overall damage was not too bad. Our boats were not hurt, we just lost some tools, supplies, and documents that were too close to the ground. We picked up the pieces and were carrying on as usual when Hurricane Milton came along.

The water came up quite a bit higher in Milton, removing our 420’s from their trailers and smashing them into the Optimist Prams and Minifish, which then floated into the Sunfish rack, freeing all of them and sending them into the Laser rack and then the whole jumble of boats fetched up against our bigger boats and the fence. What a mess. Here’s a video summary:

The small sailboat pile was interlocked and we had to cut the rig off a Laser to extract it.

These 420’s were strapped to ground anchors on their trailers. Now the trailers and the metal pole barn roof and two of the hulls need repair.

Inside the building there seems to have been some wave action, enough to knock over a pretty big air compressor. It was pungent.

After we shoveled away the wet piles, the dried mud had to be scraped from the floor. It’s still going to need pressure washing.

We got the small boats moved from the messy pile at one end of the yard.

To a more organized stack at the other end of the yard. Next up: rebuilding the small sailboat racks and the trailers for the 420’s.

While we were cleaning up we talked to a couple of people who work for Charlotte County and they said that restoring operation of the boat ramp is a priority but the damage has not yet been fully evaluated. When the ramp is open again, we expect to open the Sailing Center again. Until that time, the park gate is locked and we are being allowed occasional access to clean up but we can not operate as of the end of October, 2024.

Can you lift one end of a Sunfish? Or push a broom? If so, we can use your help tomorrow at the Charlotte Harbor Community Sailing Center.

Charlotte County will let us into the Beach Complex in the morning. The park remains closed to the public.

When I took this picture on Wednesday, September 11, 2024, it was just another picture of Dennis doing some adult sailing instruction. I have hundreds of these. It’s still somehow worth taking a picture every time. I did not know then that this would be the last one.

As I write this in late October, the Sailing Center is heavily damaged and that floating dock is in pieces. The park where we operate is closed and we are being allowed access only to clean up our boats and building.

The floating docks were constructed by volunteers for the 2012 IFDS World Championship and so were outfitted to mount hoists used to get people from a wheelchair to a boat and back again.

Sailing is a special kind of freedom, whether it’s the person learning how to make the most of the wind later in life like in the picture above or it’s our sailors who arrive in a chair but who have the same freedom of movement as others once on the water.

We’ll gather our boats and our dock and be back when we can. Details on the damage coming in the next post.

The Sailing Center is happy to accomodate adults who have never sailed and those who sailed long ago and want to get back into it. Here’s a short video:

On the last day of our week-long Kids Sailing Camps we like to let the kids sail from the Port Charlotte Beach Complex across to Punta Gorda and back. It only works if the kids have learned enough and the weather cooperates and we got both this week!

A pic of the group of Sunfish and one Minifish sailing out Alligator Bay toward Charlotte Harbor.

Sunfish and Minifish crossing tacks on Charlotte Harbor.

Sunfish sailing upwind to Charlotte Harbor.

We have a couple of older teens in our last Kids Camp of 2024. We like to see people of all ages learn to sail.

This youngster is big enough to right a Sunfish if he should capsize it.

This girl has been with us before and knows how to sail a Minifish. It really helps some of the new kids to talk to someone their own age or younger, or just to follow her around as she sails.

Light winds shift around a lot in the sheltered basin so the kids learn to pay attention to it.

The Sailing Center has been donated a 1985 Com-Pac 19 sailboat. The most recent registration sticker on this boat is 11 years old and it’s easy to believe no one has sailed it since then. It’s dirty and neglected looking.

Boats like this can be hard for individual owners to sell. It needs so much work that hiring it out would consume the sale price and people can’t or won’t do it themselves, so the boats deteriorate until they find their way to a landfill.

We interrupt that process with volunteers who are willing to use a little elbow grease on an old boat so we can sell it to support The Sailing Center. If you have a boat to donate or if you are willing to help us rejuvenate donations, contact us today!