Tampa Bay to Key West, Florida
March 4
My apologies for a long pause in blog output. It has been a busy few months in the south!
After getting waylaid in Tampa by cold and blustery, rain and fog, I headed south with another Small Craft Advisory lifting. It was a bumpy ride across the north shore of Tampa Bay and south towards Bradenton Beach, including a game of chicken with a big tugboat. I always give way to other boats until I figure out their course. My behaviour, however, is confusing for commercial vessels who deal with whacky boaters zigzagging around them every day. I always smile and wave to the big boat captains as WW passes them safely on their “1”.
I entered the Inter-Coastal Waterway (ICW) again, dodging fast boats on my way to Sarasota. I anchored behind the “wilderness” of Otter Key, with a packed waterfront that is the “luxury community” of Lido Key across the narrow inlet. The Gulf was calmer the next day and I aimed for the Big Sarasota Pass with its well-known shoaling. Shoaling is shifting, underwater sand dunes that are always in flux. Traveling this pass between the islands required consulting the local boat club’s online directions because the official charts were predictably wrong – they can’t keep up with the shifting sands. You learn this about shoaling in barrier island cuts; when in doubt, don’t go out (or in). I went out behind a service tug until I realized they didn’t do their homework given their faltered track and speed. Another fishing boat also attempted several pathways out. I stuck to the locals’ markers and eventually we all got out safely.
It was a great run in the Gulf all the way to Cayo Costa State Park. Easing my way over more shoaling to an anchorage, I found and anchored next to my Looper friends, the Loon-a-Sea and Honey Badger. I stayed here for several nights walking the beaches to swim and fish, catching Red Drum or Redfish and small Black Groupers. Redfish are very tasty. It was mid-week in February and the beaches weren’t busy. The few local boats that came to the places where I was walking beached like it was Normandy or Okinawa spilling occupants onto the beach and planting chairs and umbrellas in front of me. This expression of the “entitled me” culture and its prevalence is worrisome, but I still shed my clothing and swam. I would not want to visit the Park on a weekend or holiday, otherwise it was beautiful and importantly, it was finally starting to warm up!
I eventually headed south passing Pine and Sanibel islands that were devasted by Hurricane Ian. I docked at Fort Meyers Beach next to the last of the working Patrol Torpedo Boats, as in John F. Kennedy’s PT 109, and one of favourite childhood movies. Fort Meyers Beach was also rebuilding and doing well, just don’t drive there unless you want to spend your beach time sitting in a car. I was here to pick up my next crew, nephew Hayden, who was joining me to make the long crossing to the Florida Keys.
We resupplied and set out in the Gulf for Marco Island where we would overnight before crossing to the Keys. After meeting some Canadian snowbirds while fueling in Naples, we joined the crazy-train of American boaters in the narrow and shallow ICW winding through the mangroves to Marco Island. I would have gone back into the Gulf if I’d realized it was the weekend, but I’m often lost among days out here. The next day looked excellent for the 82 NM crossing of Florida Bay, including a thumbs up on weather and waves from Captain Kim. It was a smooth ride with swells to 3’ and a light chop that eventually got rougher as we approached Jewfish Basin northeast of Key West. I was astounded that crab pots blocked our entire path across Florida Bay, sometimes at >50’ deep. We eventually navigated our way through a shallow channel into the keys on a falling tide and dropped anchor just west of the Mud Keys where we would be protected from the NE winds for a few days.
We launched Theodore - my tender finally got a name courtesy of my sister - and explored the keys, swimming and fishing. Unfortunately for Hayden, his allergic reaction to WW (old carpets – off gassing, bilge stink – mold and mildew in the bowels of the hull) forced us to cut our key adventures short and grab a dock slip in downtown Key West about 25 NM away.
Key West is an interesting, eclectic town of original and new age hippies which explains, in part, its recent and proudly celebrated secession from the USA as the Conch Republic. Many of the new-agers seem to live on mostly floating, one-time vessels anchored just offshore, probably due to the cost of homes on land. I did a double take when a young, bearded, and rubber booted man motored his way offshore in a very dilapidated looking dingy, standing with no life jacket and one arm wrapped around a very new-born baby. I visited the Florida Keys Eco-Discovery Center. It is a good space and the staff were excellent. The place was a bit tired which surprised me because it seems an education opportunity lost with >5M people visiting Key West annually, including up to 90,000 cruise ship patrons that could be funneled to this place. Key West has a night-life reputation, and I concur that if you enjoy the bar scene, this is your town.
Hayden headed home to San Diego where he is working on a PhD in climate science. His studies sparked a great conversation about the science of climate change and human behaviour. “Great” may be a one-sided opinion because I’m known to push young minds into the dark corners of science often avoided. We agreed that the evidence for human-induced climate change is strong, specifically that the burning fossil fuels drives a global greenhouse effect that is warming the planet. I’m inclined to remind young scientists that supporting evidence alone doesn’t prove an idea is real, such evidence is correlational. The growing evidence does increase the probability of reality, if the new evidence is independent of existing evidence (a philosophical aside for another day), and with the caveat that the level of probability is still unknown. It is also important to remember that this change has happened over <100 years in a system that functions on a time scale of millions of years and is too complex for us to understand as our best climate scientists acknowledge. For a very long time, the greatest scholars on the planet believed the world was flat so it is important to be prepared that a science consensus may be wrong.
As Hayden argued very eloquently however, we still need to go with our best science today and tackle what we know are the real, negative impacts on the environment from burning fossil fuels and the concomitant impacts of petroleum-derived synthetic chemicals, including plastic. Whether or not our actions solve the climate crisis is irrelevant because stopping these activities known to harm the environment, which most likely includes the increasing greenhouse effect, is critically important for the planet.
I am proud of him and all the young scientists who face an incredibly challenging battle with the entrenched petroleum industrialists and their minions, a.k.a. politicians, financiers, media, and more. This industry (and most others) needs a very substantial remodel. As one example, it is mind-boggling that $18B in subsidies flowed to the oil industry from Canadian tax dollars while these companies scooped up $38B in profits in 2023. This isn’t capitalism or a free market, I believe economists call it neo-feudalism, and they also agree that it is destroying society along with natural environments. We need petroleum, but we also need to sever this dinosaur-thinking that locked us into chasing short-term profits based on growth regardless of life cycle impacts on our world. That gem of modern economics is killing us. Economists seem to agree that capitalism isn’t inherently bad, but we created a Frankenstein-like, capitalism monster (not my analogy) that evolved by feeding the masses just enough to be well off (at least most people) and the false dream of equal opportunities to make a better life, which collectively made us lazy of thinking otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are today.
This monster is destroying life on our planet and the young people know it. I believe that the “democracy” model remains our best option for building fair and sustainable societies, but I agree that our attempts at democracy have fallen short and we find ourselves in an endless do-loop with moments of good in a cycle of mostly bad states of society structure (if interested, this is well-visualized in the Tyler Cycle). I thought we would need a revolution to overcome our dilemma, so I have been perplexed seeing no change after Occupy Wall Street, the Global Economic Crisis, and the Covid Pandemic. Maybe we are on a slow trajectory of cumulative, positive impacts that will save us, so I will keep working to help young people fix these critical local and global problems their elders created. Stepping off my soapbox now.
Key West was a milestone; it is the farthest point south in my expedition. That leaves about 3,000 NM of boating remaining to find my way home.
Until next time,
Allen
Key West, FL
