February 28 - March 1, 2010 Marathon & Key Largo

We are in romantic Key Largo!

We finished our stay at Marathon early as a decent weather window for wind and waves opened up on Monday, March 1st. But before we went, Mark finally came home with a "keeper". He has been fishing several times, and even though he reports that he has caught fish... Anyway, on Sunday before we put the dinghy away Mark came home with this crevalle jack. Amazingly, we had just been watching a Florida fishing station that showed where and how to catch this fish. They are good fighters and once in the boat, if you hold them by the spot on the gills, they stop moving so you can take the hook out. Interesting stuff, huh!

When we consider traveling on big water we check several internet weather sites. One we like a lot is Passage Weather. It shows wind and wave predictions. The weekend had been very windy with 25-40 mph winds, Monday looked better, and the rest of this week is predicted to have high wind and waves. So Monday was the day to move on. The first half of the journey was bumpy - we had winds of 15 mph and 3-5 foot waves flying over the bow. This was unexpected. The seas laid down to about 2 feet midway through the trip - much better. Again we had dolphins share our trip - there were several this time with 2-3 babies. Look at the color of that water.

The trip was about 55 miles and took us just under 6 hours to get to the markers outside of Port Largo. This is where it got really interesting. The way you pass through the Port Largo Canal is by announcing your approach to both the entrance and "Crash Corner". Since our arrival was near 1:00 PM, the Key Largo Princess, a glass bottom boat, was on its way out, and we needed to wait until the canal was clear.

After several boat exited Captain Mark announced that 45-ft. motor vessel, Grateful, was inbound at the Port Largo Canal jetty (entrance). And we started the trek to "Crash Corner".

The Port Largo Canal has three channels off the main canal at 90 degree angles. As we proceeded to crash corner, the boats and houses down these canals were beautiful.

Then we were finally approaching crash corner. Mark announced our coming and received an answering response. Fortunately it was a smaller fishing boat and we waited for him to clear the corner, and we were on our way to Marina Del Mar.

We made it to the slip by 1:30 and needed to back in because the finger was not long enough for us to get off the boat if we went bow in. We usually need to go bow in so that we can hook up our power cords that come out the front. Fortunately, our power cords were just long enough with the help of duct tape and lines to keep everything stable - we're pretty classy.

We intend to stay a week here while we wait for a weather window to go to the Bahamas. That will be a 75 nautical mile trip from Key Largo to South Bimini. More to come.....