FINALLY – We are in the Keys

Waking up each day on the boat is always a treat, but waking up and knowing that we will reach another milestone is even more exciting. Our destination today is Boot Key Harbor City Marina in Marathon. The water in the Keys is VERY shallow in many places and it is extremely important that we stay within the channel. Often we could look just outside the channel and we would see the coral seabed - the water was that clear and shallow.



The second exciting aspect of reaching this harbor is that it is located on the Atlantic side of the Florida Keys. The dividing line between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean is (in my opinion) the totally arbitrary placement of US Route 1 that links the Keys to mainland Florida. The famous Seven Mile Bridge is located immediately south of the city of Marathon and when we pass under this bridge we will pass from the Gulf to the Atlantic. It was very exciting to first spot the bridge and know that we were close to our destination.

So it was under the bridge, into the Atlantic, then hard to port and into the long channel entrance to Boot Key.

At this point, I am not only excited about arriving in the Keys but I have major butterflies because for the first time ever, we will be on a mooring ball (or can as they are called in Chicago). I knew that we should have practiced this docking skill while still in Chicago and our friend Kurt offered to allow us to use this mooring ball to practice, but somehow we just never got around to it and now I am wishing that we had! The way this works is that a large floating ball is anchored in place at the harbor floor. When we arrive at our assigned mooring, the deck monkey (me) has to reach down into the water to grab the line that is attached to the top of the mooring ball, lift it out of the water with the boat hook, and then run a boat line through the eyelet at the end of the mooring line to attach the boat to the mooring ball.



The key here is that Captain Mark has to get us close enough that I can reach the line in the water and I have to NOT fall off the boat during the process. Also, Mark can not see the line in the water from his location at the helm so I have to guide him to where the line is floating. Of course as we get closer, the wake of our boat makes the mooring line bob around like a slippery eel. This is where our headphones once again proved to be Marriage Savers! We were able to communicate efficiently and I was able to grab and lift the mooring line on my first attempt. I was so proud of myself that I did not even notice how wet and slimly the mooring line was until I had finished securing the boat.



With all of that drama completed, it was time to relax a little. So after we check in with the harbormaster, I settle in and of course reach for my computer. We have several other boating friends who blog and I routinely check their blogs to see where they are in their journeys. As I am reading Paul and Emy’s Restless Wind blog, I find that they are currently in this harbor having been delayed due to repairs to their rudder. Mark immediately contacts them and we make arrangements to meet with them to catch up and compare stories. We first met Paul and Emy when they spent time on P Dock in Chicago last summer shortly after they started their journey from Wisconsin. We again met them in Peoria and traveled the Illinois Waterways with them to the Mississippi. It was wonderful to see them again and we had a terrific time comparing adventurers.