'Horrifying experience': Hurricane Milton destroys waterfront restaurant on Pine Island
Luretta Wilson needs one last goodbye.
Damage from Hurricane Milton was just too much for her iconic Bokeelia restaurant overlooking Charlotte Harbor.
“I haven’t seen it yet,” Luretta said late Friday from Kentucky, before taking a plane back to the island on Saturday. “I’m coming back. My kids don’t want me to, but it’s my decision. (Capt’n Con’s) has been my baby for a long time and I really want to see it.”
Still recovering from Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters two weeks ago, the historic waterfront restaurant couldn’t withstand Milton’s wrath.
“We are done,” Rachel Wilson, Luretta’s youngest daughter, said. “We won’t even bother after this. We lost the whole front dining room. The front porch, the kitchen is all messed up. The last (security camera) photo I saw, water was past the foot ramp.”
The ramp is gone too, some of it pushed into the building along with sand and mud. A glimpse inside the blown-out windows showed interior fixtures, appliances, mugs, plates, and provisions haphazardly stacked against the surviving back wall.
The upper floor of the attached gift shop sagged precipitously and appeared near collapse.
It was Rachel who delivered the crushing news to her mother.
“I could tell by her voice something was wrong,” Luretta said. “She said, ‘Mom, I gotta tell you something. It’s gone.’ I had a feeling that would happen with this storm.”
Milton made its way up the Gulf on Wednesday, Oct. 9, setting off tornadoes and a storm surge of 5 to 6 feet at various spots in Southwest Florida before making landfall south of Tampa as a Category 3.
“I have a right to come back down and see (the restaurant),” Luretta said. “It makes my stomach turn 50 times just thinking about it. I know it’s not going to be good. I really need to tell it goodbye. It’s been good to me. It helped raise my kids and grandkids.”
A lifetime of memories
In 1904, the building across from the Bokeelia Fishing Pier that would eventually house the beloved restaurant began as a private residence and post office. The story of Luretta and Capt’n Con’s Fish House began four-plus decades ago.
“The first time I worked there in 1979, it was called Sea Breeze (Restaurant),” she said. “I left and went back to work in ‘85 or ‘86 as a salad lady. Then they threw me into cooking. I said I didn’t cook. But I took to it and loved it.”
She loved it so much, she stayed with it, plus “bussing tables and whatever else was needed,” until she broke a hip in 2019.
She bought the restaurant, then called Crab Shack, in 1995.
“I never thought I would ever own it,” she said. “I was just a cook, living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else. But I had good credit.”
The owner paid Luretta to run it and, after a rough summer, sold her the business.
“I think she had $27,000 in debt,” Luretta recalled. “She gave me five years to pay it off. That’s what she sold it to me for. I had to take my credit cards to the bank for cash for first month’s rent.”
With three kids, Luretta didn’t have the money herself, so she talked to “the girls there.”
“I had it paid off in 2 ½ years,” Luretta said. “I paid the girls back first. Everything worked out just great.”
Over the years, word of Capt’n Con’s spread.
“It’s an icon,” Rachel said. “I know people all over the world came here. This is a big deal.”
Hurricanes Charley, Ian, Helene and Milton
With its unobstructed views of Charlotte Harbor on the northernmost point of Bokeelia, Capt’n Con’s has always been vulnerable to hurricanes.
“I was surprised it didn’t go in Charley,” Luretta said. “We had to keep putting new doors on.”
But it stood strong after that monster of a storm in 2004.
And it did well after Ian, becoming the first restaurant on the island to reopen, just two weeks after it tore through in 2022.
But on Sept. 26 and 27, 2024, Helene did the most damage to date, flooding out the building and putting its future in doubt.
In preparation for the storm, Luretta said she filled “at least 60 sandbags and put them around stuff.”
“But water just poured right in,” she said. “Every piece of equipment we had, we lost. My daughters say we will reopen. My daughter goes, ‘Mom, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it and make it come back.’”
And they did, for a day or two.
“We were trying to open part of it,” Rachel said. “The part we were trying to open we lost.”
Word of Milton’s approach came less than two weeks later.
So they braced themselves and the restaurant again, this time removing all the new and donated equipment they were just putting in.
“We took the freezers and food out before the storm,” Luretta said. “We knew it was going to be bad.”
No preparations could have stopped Milton.
“I feel like if maybe the building had been a little stronger, maybe it would have made it,” Luretta said. “The front was just really weak. It’s just so sad.”
The last goodbye
Capt’n Con’s employed between 18 to 20 people in the summer months and 25 to 27 in season.
“I haven’t slept much in four days,” Luretta said. “I worry about them. About the good ones who always helped.”
After her return to the island and her goodbye to Capt’n Con’s on Saturday, Oct. 11, Luretta wasn’t sure what would happen next.
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"I don’t think my heart can take it,” she said. “I spent so much time there, it will hurt so much to be around. I may come back to Kentucky full-time.
“It’s a horrifying experience. It’s going to be so hard. That old building took a lot. And it gave a lot to friends, to my kids. It gave me a lot.”
Robyn George is a food and dining reporter for The News-Press. Connect at rhgeorge@fortmyer.gannett.com
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Capt'n Con's Fish House on Bokeelia destroyed by Hurricane Milton