Well, here we are, in the fabled Florida Keys! Feels more like home right now -- temp 54, with wind chill 47! There is a cold front moving down Florida that is supposed to take the temps in Naples down to 20. It is supposed to warm up to 70 and be sunny by Friday. We arrived here on Monday and spent Tuesday watching the inauguration (yeah!) and doing laundry.
Those who have been following my blog know from my SPOT (googlemap) posts that we were in a campground and marina at Everglades National Park for several days. We completed setting the boat up for launch, launched, and spent two nights in the Flamingo marina before heading out into Florida Bay.
The facilities at Flamingo are heavily hurricane-damaged. The lodge and cottages are totally uninhabitable. The marina store does not sell fuel although the tanks and pumps are all there (they are changing concessionaires.) The toilets in the campgrounds have fallen into such a state of disrepair that they really need to be seen to be believed. All in all, for what should be one of the premier national parks, the facilities at Everglades are a sad commentary on how far and how fast the National Park Service has fallen in the past eight years. We can only hope that some of the Obama public-works funds will be allocated to repairs in our national parks.
Here is a link to the first of a series of photos of Flamingo in my album:
To get to Sugarloaf Key we had to transit Florida Bay to Seven-Mile Bridge (approximately in the middle of the Keys), go under the bridge into the Atlantic Ocean and then go southwest to Sugarloaf (14 miles from Key West.) We had several adventures en route.
Boating in Florida is nothing like boating in the Pacific North West. The water is very shallow, and it is easy to run aground, as we found out (all the guidebooks say this is SOP, but still it is disconcerting.) The reason we ran aground had multiple causation, but in the end it was my fault. First, many of the channel markers were damaged in the hurricanes that have hit south Florida in recent years. The channel marker numbers often do not agree with what is on the charts, but I found out later that one should just trust the markers (verifying visually and with depthsounder, of course) and follow them.
Complicating the navigation are the many crab pots, which would not be so bad if they did not have long lines attaching them to their floats. In water 2.5' deep, a 10' crab pot line creates a 7.5' horizontal obstacle that needs to be avoided -- but one first has to determine which direction from the float the line is drifting. Long story short, I failed in trying to avoid one of these crab pot lines, got my prop fouled and then went aground. Lori stripped down, jumped in the water (chilly but bearable, she said) and cut the crab pot line free, then pulled the boat off the shoal. What a gal!
After our adventures on Florida Bay we thought we were home free. Nope! We encountered a little thing called the Gulf Stream and 15 knot winds as we slogged our way against both from Seven Mile Bridge to Sugarloaf Key. Because of the wind, we could not get up on plane without getting badly beaten up so were limited to a very fuel-inefficient 10 knot speed. And because we were bucking the 8-knot Gulf Stream, we effectively only made about two knots over the ground.
As a result it took us all afternoon to get from the bridge to the channel leading back to the KOA where we are staying. Here, as elsewhere, the channel markers were out of sequence and did not agree with the charts, but we made it to the bridge where we had been told the KOA was on the other side. Only one problem: the bridge has only about 6' clearance. Fortunately, however, our information was incorrect and the KOA marina was located on our side of the bridge.
The people here are incredibly nice, the facilities are wonderful and aside from the distinctly un-Floridan weather, we are very happy to be here. We plan to use this as a base for at least the next week. We are renting a car and will use it to explore Key West and check out where we might stay or anchor on our way back. We have not yet decided whether we will go north along the east coast of Florida past Ft. Lauderdale and Miami to Stuart, and from there transit through the Okeechobee to the Ft.. Myers area on the west side of the state.
