- (ocean waves breaking) (gentle music) - [Narrator] Cayo Costa Island, Spanish for The Key by the Coast, has remained much the same since man first began fishing its shores thousands of years ago.

Over eight miles long, it is the largest and least developed barrier island along Southwest Florida's Gulf coast.

From the Calusa Indians, to the early pioneer families, up through modern times, Cayo Costa has been an island of great beauty and importance for people's livelihoods, family quality time, and hours of outdoor recreation.

To understand Cayo Costa Island, we must first understand its people and why they chose to live here.

(gentle music) Cayo Costa's first inhabitants were the Calusa Indians.

Their culture was based on what they acquired from their surrounding waters.

They ruled Southwest Florida and its outer islands for over 2000 years, and were known to be great warriors and highly skilled fisherman.

But when the Spanish discovered America, they brought with them diseases and gun powder.

For almost 200 years, the Calusa resisted European domination and attempts to convert them to Christianity.

But by the 1700s, disease, warfare and slavery drove them to extinction.

Many reminders of their vast culture were left behind including mounds made up of thousands of shells and countless fish bones.

One of the first pioneer families to settle Cayo Costa was the Padillas.

Captain Toribio Padilla was born 1832 in the Canary Islands.

His wife, Juana Perez, was from Mexico.

Together they raised a family and established a Fish Ranchero, or fishery, on Cayo Costa, in the 1870's.

Stanley Darna is the great-grandson of Toribio and Juana Perez Padilla.

He's the youngest of three brothers who grew up on Cayo Costa.

The stories he recalls have been handed down from generation to generation.

- My great-grandfather ran a fish camp over in Cayo Costa.

I know that, on the north end, in a place called the Old Place Hole.

He was also a bootlegger.

He did whatever he had to do to in those days to make a living.

The Cuban Schmacks, as they called 'em, would come up come over and they'd bring a rum called Hoggeden.

They were in tall bottles, long necks, big round jugs.

And I remember my uncle telling me about it 'cause I think he might a tried some of it at one time or another.

We lived in a little ole three-room house, used to call them the Florida shotgun houses.

You'd come in the front door and go right on out the back door, right through the middle of it.

I thought we were pretty poor, but we ate very well because my dad caught all kinds of fish, different types of fish, mostly mullet what we ate.

The fancy fish, that they used to call it back in those days were trout, pompano, mackerel.

They got a bigger price for them than mullet, so we didn't eat too many of those.

They were sold, most of those.

My dad was born, I believe, on Cayo Costa in 1910.

At one point or another, Pop went to school here in Boca Grande, not this school that's here now.

There used to be another school down there about where the Boca Grande Hotel is.

He got to the eighth grade and that as... That's the education that my dad had.

In 1927, when the Mid-Island Lighthouse was being built, my dad was 17 years old, and he was hired and worked to help build that lighthouse in 1927.

He would carry in a bucket, the hot rivets, and then he'd go up the scaffolding.

He'd hold the rivets in while the people inside they'd take it and rivet it together.

He made big money.

50 cents an hour, six days a week.

You know, he said man, he said "I had change in my pocket," you know.

(laughs) Probably 95% of his money that he ever made was from commercial fishing.

- [Narrator] Virginia Padilla Morton is one of the Pine Island old-timers.

They get together for a cookout once a year.

She owns and operates Jug Creek Marina in Bokeelia.

Located next to the Marina is a commercial fish house that her father, Toribio Padilla's grandson, Jesse Padilla, started after the family moved off of Cayo Costa in the 1940's.

Virginia has saved photos collected from family members who grew up on Cayo Costa, as a way to preserve their history.

- I know about Cayo Costa because Toribio Jose Padilla, or Padilla as we say, he discovered it.

He raised his family, which was my grandfather, and my grandfather raised his family on the island.

When they first went to the island they all spoke Spanish.

That's the only language they knew.

The Cuban boats would come in on the gulf side of Cayo Costa.

They'd sell their fish, which was salted and whatever you do back in the days when you didn't have ice.

I know they did a lot of traveling in their boats.

I know they ate a lot of fish and a lot of loggerhead turtles and a lot of curlew and things that came off of the sea.

I'm sure they made everything, too, that they could.

They did have pigs over there.

They did have chickens over there.

I guess they just survived the way you do, or you did, in the 1800's with nothing around.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Around the same time, Captain Peter Nelson, originally from Denmark, was making quite a name for himself.

He established the town of Alva, Florida, was a Fort Myers school board member, a major influence of the formation of Lee County, and a member of the first Lee County Board of Commissioners.

- Peter Nelson was a very, very remarkable man.

He claimed to be the illegitimate son of the King of Denmark.

Since he was Danish, that made sense.

He did things that were quite extraordinary.

I think if you went to any serious knowledgeable historian in Southwest Florida and said give me the three most interesting and remarkable characters in the history of Southwest Florida, Captain Peter Nelson would be one of them.

- [Narrator] From 1888 to 1906, while working as a harbor pilot, he was asked by the US government to help stop the smuggling of illegal goods into the area.

Rum and tobacco were traded by the Cubans to the fishing families living on Cayo Costa.

Nelson drove the Padilla Family off the island when they were suspected as primary contacts of such trade.

- They spent some time in Tampa.

How long they were up there, I don't know.

The records show that they were arrested for bootlegging.

Both my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were arrested in Tampa for bootlegging rum.

- [Narrator] The Padillas were allowed to return to Cayo Costa a few years later, where their family stayed three more generations.

- Peter Nelson was also a partner with my grandfather and great-uncle, and a friend.

At least at times, he had this serious drinking problem.

That was a problem because drinking and piloting do not go hand and hand.

- [Narrator] When he retired, he moved to Cayo Costa where he became a schoolteacher and postmaster.

Captain Nelson is buried on Cayo Costa in a cemetery that is clearly marked.

If he were to walk around the island today, he'd be amazed to see how much of it has remained pristine and the tremendous effort being put forth to keep it that way.

(gentle music) (upbeat light music) Rufus Darna, another Darna cousin, was also born and raised on Cayo Costa.

- Yeah, I lived on Cayo Costa for about 25 years, I guess.

My grandmother, my uncles, and my cousins, they lived there.

The house we moved in, when we lived in that house, it was called the Old Martin House, and the Spearings lived there before we did.

Then the Spearings moved, and when we moved.

We bought the boat house, and we moved in there.

The fall of the year we start the running season going, and we'd see the mullet run.

When times got hard in the spring, we did the sheep heading and the seining for sheep head and whitings and stuff like that.

We brought them to the Punta Gorda Fish Company in them days.

Had a fish house across from Punta Blanca there.

A big run boat would come in and pick the fish up.

Matter of fact, there were a chain of fish houses.

There's one off of Captiva, and one off of Punta Blanca there, and the run boat would come down.

And all our mail and stuff would come by the care of the Punta Gorda Fish Company, too, the mail and stuff, and groceries and whatever.

- [Narrator] The fisherman would bring their catch to the fish houses where they would ice them down.

The run boat would pick up the fish to take to the mainland.

The fisherman would get paid in tickets they could exchange for goods or cash.

One of the barrier islands, a short distance from Cayo Costa, was Punta Blanca.

The island was originally owned by Barron Collier, an entrepreneur from New York, who eventually became the namesake of Collier County.

Collier also owned nearby Useppa Island, where he developed a resort.

He invited tourists and business acquaintances from up north to come down to Useppa to relax and fish the waters in Pine Island Sound and Boca Grande Pass.

Punta Blanca was used to provide housing for the families who worked on Useppa as caretakers, boat craftsman, and fishing guides.

Collier built a small school there for the fisherman's children because the fisherman couldn't get them to schools on the mainland.

Francis Barnes Poppell moved with her family to Punta Blanca in 1938.

She attended the one-room school house there, with children from Cayo Costa, Boca Grande, Cabbage Key, and Useppa.

They were taken to and from school by a school boat.

- There was one through six, and we would... Each teacher would bring each class up to sit on the bench.

If we were doing math, she would do math.

Then the next class, we would go up for geography or spelling and then go back to our seats.

There were about 12, 15 kids that went.

And we would get out early and play ball as always.

That all we knew how to do was play baseball.

All the kids, except about five, went on the boat to Cabbage Key, and mostly Cayo Costa.

That's where everybody lived.

They didn't live on Punta Blanca, they lived on Cayo Costa.

I really didn't appreciate it that much when I was a child.

I just took it for granted, but now I know that it was beautiful, and it was not messed-up.

I mean it was kind of pristine, whatever was there.

We were allowed to swim in the waters, and eat the seafood, and eat the oysters.

You know, we were able to get a lot of seafood that was very good for us.

- [Narrator] Robert Ballard is a 5th-generation Floridian who frequently gives lectures about the history of Cayo Costa.

- If you've been out here, you know there's no electricity out here.

There was no electricity back then, either.

It hasn't changed much from that aspect.

- [Narrator] It's a subject he's been passionate about ever since he found a metal box, once belonging to his grandfather, George Albert Spearing, filled with historic pictures and records depicting life on the islands.

- My Mother was a Spearing.

She was born on Cayo Costa in 1929.

Her father came down from Crystal River about 1927.

My family lived on not only on Cayo Costa, but they lived on Useppa, they lived on Cabbage Key, which back then was called Palmetto Key.

They lived on Mondango, and they lived on Petricio.

They were pretty much nomads.

The people living on the island were nomads, up and down the coast where the fish were, where you can make a living.

- [Narrator] Winston Coleman was born in 1942.

He was the youngest of seven children in his family to grow up on Cayo Costa.

- The thing I remember mostly was being lonely most of the time because your folks fished at night so they slept in the daytime.

You had to get out of the house and be quiet.

And there were no other kids my age.

There were other kids on there, but they were all different ages.

We lived on a lighter.

I guess I did when I was a baby.

And a lighter is just a houseboat that doesn't have an engine.

You tow it behind another boat.

And they would get towed from Punta Gorda to the fish house here at Punta Blanca, or down to Punta Rassa.

They just put it up and tie it to the land somewhere, you know, probably somewhere where fresh water was close by.

And then fished out of that and fished that area, and then when the fish got scarce there they'd move to another area and move the lighter.

They had pole skivs then, we didn't have many engines, and there were very few people, very few fishermen, so you could go around here all day long and never see another boat.

I would go out on the boat when I was eight or nine, 10, 11 then I started, drawing a share and working when I got to be 11 and 12.

We would commercial fish then, and we would crews completely different than it is today.

You wouldn't even recognize the commercial fishing that they do today with what we did back when I was a kid.

- [Narrator] Modern fishing methods, the changing techniques of preserving and shipping fish, along with the rise in popularity of sports fishing have all dramatically affected life on Cayo Costa.

Captain Harvey Hamilton knows first hand, exactly how changes to the commercial fishing industry affected him and his family.

Harvey is a cousin of the Danras.

His mother, Isabella, was Toribio and Juana Padilla's granddaughter, and his father, Joseph Hamilton, was a Seminole Indian.

Harvey was born on Cayo Costa in 1940.

- My daddy was a Pompano fisherman, he liked the Pompano fish.

I went with him a lot because I had to go because I was his eyes.

When me and my daddy fishing, and we Pompano fishing, he'd send me to the beach, and I'd pick the collard greens orthe sea greens.

Curlew, the white ibus, yeah, oh yeah.

We'd ate a lot of them things.

Turtles, we'd eat a lot of turtles, a lot of gophers.

We wore whatever we could get, hand me downs, mostly.

We had no shoes, naturally.

I was almost through the Marine Corps before I got shoes, again.

- [Narrator] Hamilton left Cayo Costa to join the Marines when he was 17.

After his enlistment was up, he found work in the Florida Keys, catching and training dolphins.

He's most remembered in that industry for training Flipper, and, in 1963, worked as her trainer on the original Hollywood movie with the same name.

- [Harvey] Her name wasn't really Flipper, it was Mitzie.

Her name was Mitzie.

- [Narrator] In 1968, while working with dolphins at Ocean World in Fort Lauderdale, Hamilton fell off a ladder, four stories high, and broke bones in both his legs.

It was a devastating accident that ended his professional training career.

Wanting to be close to his roots, he moved to Bokeelia to work once again, as a commercial fisherman, and later start a family.

- Uncle Lewis lived a little bit further and Uncle Fonzo and grandma used to live to the right, right next to the park rangers.

- [Narrator] Andrew Hamilton is the youngest of Harvey's three sons.

He lives nearby on Pine Island, and often spends time with his dad on the water.

- I started running boats and stuff with my dad at a very young age to back to where I can't even remember.

I probably had my first boat, small boat, when I was 13, 14 years old.

I grew up on a boat.

I lived on my Dad's 40-foot boat every summer.

I thought that I would be you know, the same commercial fishing, the same as my dad.

- [Narrator] As Florida's population grew, so did the popularity of sport fishing.

As an attempt to keep the fish population thriving, a net ban, outlawing the use of large commercial monofilament fishing nets, went into effect.

- [Andrew] The net ban in '95 affected all of Pine Island, Bokeelia.

It wouldn't be the way it is today if that wouldn't have happened.

There would be a lot more commercial fisherman.

It actually took a lot of livelihoods.

People had to figure out what to do.

My Dad started studying for his Captain's license.

And while everybody else was complaining about it, he knew that he had to make money and he sold his nets and bought rods and reels.

That's why he was such a good charter guide because he knew from commercial fishing the area, just all over this whole countryside, from here to Key West.

I actually got my Captain's license in 2005, and I went a different path.

I became a chef.

I realized that Florida is ran on tourism There's no fighting it.

You have to do what you have to do to support your family.

I knew the restaurant business would always pay the bills.

- [Narrator] Andrew is the chef and owner of Saltwater Smokehouse, a popular seafood and ribs restaurant on the way to St.

James City.

When the school on Punta Blanca closed in the late 1940's, there were still several children living on the outer islands.

For a while, the Lee County School District would pay for a school boat to pick up these youngsters and take them to the Boca Grande School.

- The county no longer wanted to run that boat.

It wasn't cost effective.

They quit running it in the end of December of 1959.

Well, school continued until June.

So my dad would take me, run me to Boca Grande.

Sometimes it'd be two or three o'clock in the morning, depending on the time of the year it was for fishing for my dad.

He'd let me off at the county dock called the L dock, and I would walk to my Aunt Nona's and she had the porch opened, had a old long Florida porch on there with a little rollout bed.

Whatever time I would get there, two or three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning, I would lay down and take me a little nap and Aunt Nona would come and wake me up at 7 o'clock in the morning, feed me breakfast, and then I'd go to school from there.

- [Narrator] Making the trip everyday across Boca Grande Pass was not easy.

So in 1960, Alfonso Darna decided it was time for his family to move, making them the last pioneer family to leave Cayo Costa.

Like the others before them, they relocated to one of the nearby fishing communities, where they could enjoy utilities and roads on the mainland, while continuing to fish the waters they knew so well.

(gentle music) Over 2400 acres of Cayo Costa was designated a state park in 1986.

Today, it attracts thousands of visitors a year.

They come from all over the world, by boat or daily scheduled ferries.

There are 23 private homes used for vacations or weekend getaways.

The appeal of Cayo Costa in its unspoiled state is its ability to be utilized as a natural outdoor classroom for anyone interested in learning about old Florida.

IMAG kids from the IMAG History and Science Center in Fort Myers have begun an educational trip to Cayo Costa, aboard the Tropic Star, one of the ferry services that transports passengers to and from Cayo Costa State Park.

Their trip was sponsored by Friends of Cayo Costa, a division of the Barrier Island Park Society, a non-profit organization, that hosts events that help raise awareness and support for Cayo Costa State Park.

Park rangers manage the island with the help of their volunteers.

Once on the island, the kids and their chaperones hopped on an open air tram that traveled along a sandy trail through the dunes toward the beach.

- Welcome to Cayo Costa.

- [Narrator] The group was met by a naturalist and a park Ranger, who served as their tour guides, as they explored different parts of the island, from the back bays to the gulf.

The opportunity is there to see many of the same plants and animals the pioneer families experienced.

- [Sharon] We're going to talk about these little creatures right here.

Does anybody know what they're called?

- [Narrator] Sharon McKenzie is the executive director of the Barrier Island Park Society.

- If you were going to teach children about the history of the island, you need to take them to the island.

You need to take them to the island, and you need to connect them to the place and the things that those pioneers did.

Them being able to walk the same footsteps, go to the same places that those people lived, being able to share all those different things with kids will make that history relevant, and it will stay within them, and hopefully make them future protectors of that history and that place.

- [Narrator] Cayo Costa typically is staffed by a team of rangers on a daily basis.

- Hopefully in the future, my kids and grandkids will be able to come out out to Cayo Costa, and it's going to be a very similar place as it is right now, and it was 50, 100, or 500 years ago.

- [Narrator] What makes a trip to Cayo Costa a true adventure?

For some, it's the boat ride to an isolated island, finding seashells and seeing cactus flowers for the first time.

- [Narrator] For others, who come from boating or fishing families, it's very natural for them being in and around the water.

- [Kid] I found one.

- Snapper?

- Nope.

- It's a tushenaya hara.

- Yeah, a little sand brown.

Great for bait.

- [Narrator] Each young visitor has their own personal experience they take with them when they leave the island.

- I learned a lot about some of the endangered plants and nature here, and we learned a lot about shells.

And I wish people would actually make an effort to learn about them because people who are uneducated sometimes are the people who actually... they don't really blend in with the environment.

They more just make it, they change it.

- I think they should keep it the same because, it's just people like to enjoy nature on this island.

(gentle music) (upbeat light music) - [Narrator] Cayo Costa, the Key by the Coast.

Everyone who has come to know this island wants to preserve and protect its timeless beauty.

- I'm just grateful that I was able to live there and experience being on the islands.

It's something that they can never take away.

- Well really actually I enjoy, enjoyed living on the island and wouldn't trade nothing of it for anything in the world.

It was just home.

That was my fondest memory is that it was home.

- I'd like to see it just like it is right now, as a park.

I'd like to see it stay that way and not commercialized like you see so many islands have been in the past, right on up the coast, on both coasts.

All these things would be destroyed if it was commercialized.

- Saltwater's in my blood.

Saltwater's in my blood from Cayo Costa, from my dad being born here and raised here.

And now I'm raising my family the same way I was raised.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

- My spirit's still on that island.

If you hear a little rushing sound out there you know it's probably me.

(ocean waves breaking) (gentle music)