The Florida Keys

We were sad to leave Miami, where we had anchored for 2 weeks. We'd had a great visit from my son Jake and had enjoyed lots of fun visits ashore, taking in museums, galleries, bookstores, and long walks in many cool parts of the city. We staged our departure near a place called No Name anchorage which was full of boats waiting for favorable winds to cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. We anchored off the shoreline, had a pretty decent night's sleep despite the windy conditions, and left early in the morning, bashing into high Atlantic ocean winds directly out of the east. That made getting out the channel into the open ocean a wet business, but as soon as we turned south we had lovely beam reach winds and following seas all day and enjoyed a loooooong sail to a small quasi-sheltered place called Rodriguez Key. We'd planned to take a slip for the night at nearby Key Largo if the weather was really awful for anchoring without enough protection from some sort of land mass, but Key Largo had only 4' of water at low tide when we arrived in the late afternoon. We draw 4' 11", so we had no choice but to anchor for the night nearby in a not-so-protected spot. It turned out to be ok. The wind dropped and our anchor held through the night. It was fine. Here is a photo of the moon, which was actually the super "Blue Moon", disappearing behind scudding clouds and shining briefly on the anchor light of the only neighboring sailboat that night.  Very peaceful and quite beautiful.

The next day we had a nice long run down the Hawk Channel to Marathon, further down the Keys. We decided to take a slip for a couple of nights to give ourselves a chance to fill up on fuel and water, clean the salt off the sails, canvas, deck and stainless hardware, defrost the frig, do laundry, get a couple of nice, hot showers and MOSTLY, to see our friend Candace who works in the bar/restaurant at a place called Burdines, pictured below.

It was great to catch up a bit with Candace, who's living on her boat and clocking lots of hours to be able to take off sailing someday.  She talked Jim into trying fried key lime pie....

And Jim talked Candace into posing for a photo wearing an Eagles jersey and waving a huge Eagles flag he's been saving to fly from Neverland's masthead for the Super Bowl.

Marathon was hit hard in the 2017 hurricanes and there are still lots of badly damaged boats and buildings around. It will be a slow recovery.

There are lots of liveaboards at Burdines. Several friendly folks dropped by to say hi within minutes of us docking. This is the "backyard" of our next door neighbor Merlin, who lives on his powerboat with his little dog Zoe.

 Merlin's boat is called "Squid Marks"

As is clearly the case with most boats docked at Burdines, Squid Marks hasn't moved in quite a while, as you can see from the growth on the bottom.

And this is the view we had from our cockpit. It's not all romance and exotic beaches out here, ya know. Just sayin'.

We had a fantastic sail from Marathon to Key West on another sunny day with following winds.  Once in Key West we took a mooring ball near our friends Billy and Rebecca, and Jim raised the huge Eagles flag to the top of the mast (which helped a lot in finding the boat whenever we returned from town since the mooring field is massive).

Key West is fun if you can largely avoid Duval St and Mallory Square, which are completely overrun with tourists. These coi were in a little pond at a place we stopped one day for lunch.

There are a lot of small, quiet, off-the-beaten-track streets and alleyways. Many homes are small, well-maintained and attractively landscaped.

There are frequent, free buses that loop through downtown. We did a lot of walking though. Here are Rebecca, Billy and Jim walking downtown.

 There are loads of bars and restaurants

 And lots of chickens and very colorful strutting roosters everywhere downtown.

 A local theater was showing all the top current films

 Some places were decorated for Valentines Day
 
Here are Billy and Rebecca taking advantage of two chairs in the shade

The huge city cemetery had some interesting grave markers, some with photos or humorous inscriptions. But we didn't wander around for long because there were hardly any shade trees and it was very hot.

Rebecca loves cats and one day she coaxed about 30 half-feral cats out from under a shed downtown.

Jim outside a favorite bar, The Green Parrot, where we watched the first Olympic competitions.  

There are lots of houseboats near the dinghy dock in Key West, some of which got damaged in the hurricanes and are either being repaired or demolished. 

One day we went to the Butterfly and Nature Conservancy. I wish I could load videos in this post (it doesn't work when I try) because I have a super video of two flamingos, Rhett and Scarlett, wandering around through the visitors at the Conservancy.

We had planned to stay longer in Key West and then to sail to the Dry Tortugas, but we got word from Jim's family that an elderly relative was very ill and in the hospital. We immediately decided to sail overnight to Naples, leave the boat at a marina, and fly home for a week. Luckily, Jim's 98-year-old ex-mother-in-law recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital.

We took advantage of being in Wilmington DE to spend a few days with Jim's family and got to help celebrate at a blow-out second birthday party for twin grandsons Andrew and Ryan.  We're in Wilmington now and will return to Naples in a couple of days to continue our trip up the west coast of Florida.

To be continued!!