Key West (Feb 6- 25)

We departed Crandon Marina on Key Biscayne on Feb 1^st, transited through Biscayne Channel and into Hawks Channel, a natural channel between the Florida Keys and the reefs at the edge of the Florida Straits.  It was a pleasant day, with all sails raised or unfurled.  We reached Rodriquez Key, halfway up Key Largo after dark and anchored in the lee of Rodriquez at 7pm.  The next morning, we had another good run, with wind from behind us.  We unfurled the genoa (big front sail) and made good time to our next anchorage at Marathon Key.

The weather forecast called for winds above 20 knots for a couple of days, so we stayed at anchor off of Marathon until February 5^th.  While at anchor, we started the big Panda generator for the first time this cruising season, having spent thousands on repair work last summer.  It ran great for 90 minutes, stalled, but then started up again.  We started it the next day and it ran for 15 minutes and then stalled.  The electrical panel would not light up (an old and intermittent problem), indicating some sort of electrical connection problem.  Too hard for us to troubleshoot, it will have to wait to get back to Deltaville, VA for repairs.   Back to the Honda generator for electricity which works just great.

We raised anchor and departed Marathon at 7am on an easterly breeze.  At about 4pm we were off of Key West and turned into the channel.  We were going against the tide and it got to be a bumpy and slow ride until we got inside the harbor.  We went pass the Navy docks, and the cruise ships, and the Coast Guard base, then rounded Fleming Key (home of the US Army Special Forces underwater training center) and into Garrison Bight.

Garrison Bight is a field of 150 mooring balls maintained by the city of Key West.  It was about 80% full, but we grabbed one of the balls in the middle of the field and settled in for the evening.

In the morning, we went into the marina to check into the office.  It is one and a half miles to the docks, one of the longest rides we have had to make.  After checking in, we exchanged pleasantries with others on the docks including a lady by the name of Michele.

 

We “ubered” downtown and wandered around the shops, bars, restaurants, and other tourist traps.  We were downtown when two cruise ships were in port and the crowds were everywhere.  We learned quickly to stick our head out of boat in the morning and count the number of cruise ships.  If greater or equal to one, we would delay any trips downtown.

We did the normal things one does in Key West:  the Hemingway House, the Southernmost Point, the Aquarium, Sloppy Joe’s bar, as well as Capt. Tony’s site of the original Sloppy Joe’s.  While Key West should be on one’s bucket list, it does carry a certain “Disneyland” atmosphere that is a bit disappointing.  But the profuse  bars and restaurants  makes a bacchanalian lifestyle easy to fall into.

Southernmost Point is typical of Key West’s façade.  The Southernmost Point is not really the southernmost point on Key West which is actually a few hundred yards to the west on a military reservation and not accessible.  But even then, that is not the southernmost point in the US which is on another island to the west.

 

But the Key West site invites busloads of tourists and folks willing to stand in line for an hour just for a picture.  It goes on:  Sloppy Joes is not the real Sloppy Joe’s of Hemingway fame and the simple Margaritaville Bar is now a full fledged resort.

 

One of the things that Elena found most interesting in Key West was the iguanas.  They hung on the branches of the mangrove trees surrounded Navy housing which was on our way to the dinghy dock.  So each trip ashore resulted in a iguana watching tour.  As in many things in Key West, these were not natural to the Keys, are an invasive species, and considered a nuisance by the locals (The same could be said of cruisers like us, too)   As an aside, the Navy housing (government owned) was the best that I had ever seen with waterfront views on three sides and docks in the backyards.

Michele from our first day turned out to be our next-door neighbor.  She is a woman of a certain age, who, having raised her children in Hawaii, decided to do something else.  She has been living on a boat since Hurricane Irma.  She had arrived in Key West just before Irma, rode the hurricane out in a sail loft where she was working, lost and then recovered one boat, and then started to live on a second boat, Contessa III, looking to buy the boat from its absentee owners, who essentially had abandoned the boat.

While on the mooring ball, we ended up with four “rescues”, all within a few days.  The first was my fault.  Michele was over for dinner and I had tied her dinghy to Sophia.   When at midnight she was ready to depart, we came out of the cabin and saw the dinghy was missing.  Oh no!!

It was very dark and the wind was blowing out of the east at 10-15 knots and Fleming Key with its rocky shore was directly to the west about a quarter mile away.  It was a safe assumption that the dinghy had floated over to Fleming Key.  Michele and I jumped on our dinghy with a spotlight and began to search the shoreline.  We found the dinghy very quickly, but then the challenge came.  I need to tow Michele dinghy off the shore, but as soon as we got close enough, the wind would push me into the shallows, stalling my engine.  I would lift the engine out of the water, sometimes with it running.  In the dark, not the safest of operations.  After a half-dozen attempts, including one where I got the tow line wrapped around the propeller, we finally got both dinghies off of the shore and back to our respective boats.  Another adventure!!

The very next day I was on deck when I heard a woman on a nearby boat yelling at another boat.  She was trying to get their attention about a dinghy that had drifted away from the boat.  Of course the fellow with the lost dinghy had no way to retrieve it and again we had east winds of 10-15 knots causing the dinghy to drift quickly to the west.  We launched our dinghy and I went off to retrieve the lost little boat back to its mothership.  The owner was most grateful and rewarded us with a cold beer.

A couple of days later, during the afternoon, I was inside the cabin when I heard a barely audible voice obviously in distress.  Off in the distance, astern of Contessa, I could see a dinghy and, nearby, a person’s head.  Michele had fallen overboard.  I yelled to Michele that I had seen her, yelled to Elena “man overboard, launch the dinghy”.  Of course, as a curious female, Elena began to ask all sorts of questions, which I had to delay answering, until we got the dinghy launched.   I got into our dinghy, ran over to Michele, pulled her into my dinghy, retrieved hers, and towed it back to her boat.

Finally, a week later, I was out and about on deck.  Michele was going to the out to the outer mooring field to do some dog-sitting duties she had agreed to do.  I looked up to see her dinghy drifting, obviously not under power.  I jumped into our dinghy, but, by the time I got there, she had started her engine and was underway.  She had wrapped a line around a propeller and had gotten it cleared in a few minutes.

On all our voyages, we have never seen one of these events, much less four in week, except for a few of our own self-inflicted misadventures.  But all ended well, and it was kind of fun.

We have a water-maker onboard, but it has been in a “storage” condition for a year and to commission it and then put it back in a decommissioned status would be a bit of work.  It was easier to haul 20 gallons of water from the dinghy dock every few days.  Twenty gallons would last us 3 or 4 days.

The one repair job that required our attention was our onboard sewage treatment system (called Electro/Scan).  It had been problematic for a long time and Key West is sensitive about this sort of thing.  A quick call to the manufacturer confirmed that we needed to replace the electrodes inside the treatment tank (uck!).  The electrodes were delivered to West Marine in couple of days.  The Electro/Scan is of course in a place that is inconvenient to get to.  But Elena was a good sport about helping with a “crappy” job.  It took an afternoon, but soon we had a working system and felt better about our environmental impact on the Keys.

The winds in Key West were almost always out of the east (the trade winds) and often around 20 knots.  We could not sail back to Miami in such winds.  Frequently, when the winds and the resulting waves increased, we would stay on the boat for days at a time.  But it was getting warm and the water temperature was getting close to 80 degrees, quite comfortable for swimming.  But after almost a month in Key West, Elena was ready to head back north while I was ready to spend another couple of weeks here. In addition, for the first time in two years, we are on a schedule.  Elena is going to Russia at the end of March, and we have to be somewhere comfortable for us both by then.  When the winds finally changed, Elena won out and we left Key West on an ebb tide (i.e. with the current) on the morning of February 26 with a light south wind.