Key West Idyll

We’ve always enjoyed this place. Saturday we made what we intended to be a short trip into town and ended up staying all day. We celebrated our return to the USA with peel-and-eat shrimp and Pinot Grigio at Turtle Kraals, something of a Key West tradition for us. Part of the tradition is for John to call his sister Jenice and gloat about dining al fresco while she’s suffering whatever weather Oregon is dishing up in April. This time she wasn’t suffering at all; she was skiing and having a good time herself.

Despite long, wet dinghy rides to shore, we’re reluctant to leave here quickly. We really like Key West. There was a weather window yesterday to head north, but we decided to wait for the next one. It's less expensive for us to be on a mooring buoy here than to anchor out legally in Fort Lauderdale, but it’s probably less expensive to buy stuff in Fort Lauderdale. So we’re buying stuff online while we’re staying here and, after the first day of being tourists, we’re eating on the boat.

We’re finding it easier to go to the downtown dinghy dock than to the one that’s free with our mooring fees here at Garrison Bight. For one major thing, we haven’t found free wireless around Garrison Bight. The Pelican case we bought a year ago for the laptop is finally being used seriously when we take the computer to shore. We’re even using the dry bag to keep the rest of our stuff dry. Except for the return trip on Sunday, John and I are only getting splashes that require a rinse of the glasses to get the salt off. Sunday evening, I had to rinse the salt out of our shorts too.

We met an interesting woman Sunday at West Marine. Kathy (K or C, I don’t know) and her husband, Greg, recently bought a Cabo Rico 42 to begin their cruising life. Previously they’ve lived all over the world with Greg’s job, lastly in Singapore but also fairly recently in The Netherlands. In fact, they have dual citizenship (The Netherlands and US) and both speak a little Dutch. We stopped by their boat, Indigo, yesterday for a visit on our way back to Solstice. We had a nice visit and borreltjes. John really liked them and I think we’ll try to see them again before we leave. When we met Kathy, they didn’t know which way they were heading. Now they’ve decided to head up to the Chesapeake, so maybe we’ll see them again in Fort Lauderdale.

I updated our mileage log this morning and have a few more statistics. Panama City, Panama, is still the furthest east we’ve been by a couple of degrees. Our rhumbline from Isla Mujeres to Key West was 370 nautical miles (nm), but our actual track shows we traveled 485. You should see it. It’s quite the zigzag. That explains why it took a day longer than we thought it should.