Gulf Coast heaven

Florida’s Gulf Coast is a very different kettle of fish from the fun-crazed sprawl of Orlando-Kissimmee, but it’s not that far away. Just as everywhere in the US, navigating the freeway looks easy, and is – as long as you know exactly which junctions to follow and which exit to take. Take a wrong turn and the turnpike will carry you for miles in the wrong direction.

Cape Coral is a new, purpose-built resort that looks south across the Caloosahatchee River to Fort Myers, and our villa here looked like a set from Miami Vice – a Moorish-Andalusian fantasy home with a huge open-plan kitchen-diner, a fridge-freezer big enough to live in, four vast bedrooms and an office-den with broadband internet access. Outside was a small garden with pool and whirlpool, big views, and – best of all – its own jetty where our six-seater power boat sat waiting to go exploring.

Along the Gulf’s miles of shell-strewn sand, mangroves and offshore islands, the wildlife is free range not animatronic. Brown pelicans perch sleepily on wooden pilings or glide past, then plummet like kamikaze dive-bombers in pursuit of shoals of fish. Beyond the sand islands, schools of dolphins break the surface. Closer inshore, plump brown manatees sunbathe just below the surface and egrets and cormorants perch in the mangroves.

Down the middle of the Caloosahatchee runs what local boaters call the ‘Miserable Mile’ – a ‘no-wake’ channel where a parade of boats, large and small, chugs along at a mandatory walking pace to avoid injuring the slow and clumsy manatees that live in the inshore shallows.

Environmentally aware as I am, I could see why locals resent it. It takes half an hour to trundle through the slow zone, which is irritating when you’ve got a 40-horse outboard engine straining at the leash. But there’s no point bucking the rules – the channel is patrolled by Fish and Wildlife Department rangers in high-speed skiffs who come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who breaks the limit.

As they reach the end of the Miserable Mile, boaters push the throttle forward and vessels peel off in all directions across San Carlos Bay, heading for the sheltered shallows of Pine Island Sound or the open Gulf beyond Sanibel Island. It takes around 35 minutes to traverse the Miserable Mile – and only a quarter of an hour to zoom across the open water of San Carlos Bay to Point Ybel, on the southern tip of Sanibel Lighthouse, where a school of dolphins was waiting for us, sleek grey bodies cutting through the blue water right next to the boat.

“Cool,” said Holly, who’s seen lots of North Sea dolphins from her bedroom window but hasn’t been up close and personal with them before.

The outside curve of Sanibel Island is one long crescent of blinding white sand, covered with millions of seashells, from glittering fragments of mussels lined with opalescent mother of pearl to tiny silver winkles, pale pink bivalves and whelks adorned with baroque spirals of spines.

We anchored in waist-deep water, lathered on the sunblock and pottered for hours, then puttered back to the villa to watch the sunset from our terrace. Unbeatable. I may never stay in a hotel again.