Friday, February 24, 2012

Marathon, Florida Keys

We cruised 40 miles today in order to travel the 30 miles between Matecumbe Bight where we anchored last night to Boot Key Harbor on the southwest end of Marathon Key. We had to go an extra 5 miles west of the entrance to the harbor to get to a point where the bridge  between us and the harbor mouth was high enough to get under it, then double back.

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The City of Marathon maintains 256 mooring balls in the  harbor and rents them out for $22 a night or $119 a week.  Seems like a pretty good deal to us. The fee covers moorage, one black water pump out each week, and access to their marina where they have washrooms, laundry, a lounge with Wi-Fi, a revolving library, bicycle parking, garbage and TVs for those who need a fix. They do charge 5 cents a gallon for water.

Our final leg of the cruise was uneventful, though we now understand all the discussion about crab pots in the materials we’ve read on cruising the west coast of Florida. It’s a major maze to thread through crab pots along some portions of the route!

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Lousy picture, but can you see all the white dots?  For mile after mile, in the 5-10’ deep water, there are these crab pots that require you to be constantly vigilant so they don’t get caught in your propellers and cause major damage.  It’s REALLY hard when you’re facing directly into the sun!  We managed to only run over one in the last two days, and while we destroyed the buoy, the line did not get caught in our prop. But that’s why we brought one scuba tank and gear, so if we get a crab pot line wrapped around a prop, we can go in the water under the boat to get it untangled. Hope we never have to do that!

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Crabbing is a big industry on the west coast of Florida, and in Florida Bay, on the north side of the Keys.  A few years ago the Stone Crabs were on the verge of extinction, so they adopted a new harvesting technique.  They catch the crabs in these traps, then they cut off only one  claw and throw the crab back.  One year later they can catch the same crab and it will have grown back the lost claw, and they then repeat the process. Amazing and weird.

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After tying up the boat we wandered across the street and found ourselves a bar where we had a good margarita and some crab dip. Next to the bar they had a fresh seafood store, so we bought a number of items, including crab cakes for dinner.  A nice way to start our week in the Keys. 

Oh by the way, for those of you in the parts of North America where there is that climatic feature called winter, it was 82 degrees here today. Cathryn whined about it, but Bob wouldn’t let her complain in this blog post.

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