18Mar19: West to Key West!

Monday:  We left our nice little resort around 9:00 and started our journey to Key West.  The weather was nice – not too hot, and the breeze was following us, so it was a very comfortable day!  It was a pretty uneventful day, which is what we like when we’re out on the water!  One fun thing is that we spied Miss Utah headed toward us from Key West.

She is a nice big 52’ Bayliner that we met back on the Mississippi River last fall.  We chatted with them on the radio for a bit – they’d just been in Cuba for a couple of weeks!  Darn – we just missed seeing them in Key West.  As we approached Key West, by far the biggest thing was the cruise ship in port.  This is the Celebrity Edge.

As we came around the bend at Fort Zachary, the full stern of the ship came into view.  She’s a big one!  The harbor channel here in Key West is always busy.  Ferries, fishing boats, jet skis, yachts, cruise ships, Coast Guard.  So we just took ‘er slow and steady, and gave a call to our marina when we got to the jetty marker at the harbor entrance.  We were headed to the Key West Bight Marina, which is the municipal docks in the harbor.  There are three other marinas in the harbor, and it really looks like it is all just one big giant marina, so you need to have an idea of where you are going.  The other marinas are quite a bit more expensive than this one, and you get swimming pools and resorts kind of stuff.  But we are just fine with this one- for the same price we paid in Marathon at the nice resort!  Key West is spendy!

We’ve been here before, so we knew that the fuel dock that we wanted to go to would be straight in.  That’s a new one – we had to wait for a couple of little round tiki hut boats to zip along out of our way.   We have plenty of fuel to get home if we cruise at our normal speed, but when we go fast we use twice as much fuel.  We decided to get fuel so that when we leave we will have plenty to get us back to home if we have to cruise faster than usual.  While we were fueling, I went into the Harbormaster’s office to see where they were going to put us.  Uh Oh?   He had my reservation in his hand along with the deposit receipt.  But it wasn’t in the computer.  “No worries—- just give me a few minutes.”    OK – all set.  He assigned us to A25 which is a face dock.  But we’ll need to move in a couple of days to make room for an 85’ boat that needs that spot.  Then we’ll go into A3 which is a super wide catamaran spot.  Ok.  But – we don’t have to move in the 25mph wind and rain storm that’s coming tomorrow, do we?  Nope – not until Wednesday.  Whew!    So we tootled over to our temporary spot.  It was a nice one with a great view of Dante’s Restaurant and Pool which is quite the party place along the wharf here with music and partying all day long.  Captain did not complain about the scenery.

It was late afternoon, so we decided to go for a walkabout.  We hadn’t eaten much today, so as we headed toward Duval and stopped in at the Sandbar Sports Bar for some dinner.  I really just wanted a nice small hamburger, but nobody ever offers a just quarter pounder.  Why always half pound with schmanzy stuff that only a pro athlete can put away?  So I had fish tacos.  Darn it!  a day early!  Taco Tuesday is tomorrow and they’d be half price!  Oh well.  They were pretty good, but really only worth the half price on Tuesday.   We continued on, and one step led to another.   Before we knew it, we were all the way down Duval to the Rum Shop at the Speakeasy Inn.  It is our favorite place in Key West.  It is a bed and breakfast, with a rum bar on the first floor.  It is small and intimate, so anybody who is there is within arms reach so conversations mingle together and you end up chatting with everyone.  It is a historical building that used to be a brothel, which they say is understood from the style of lattice – with bottles and hearts – indicating ‘brothel’.  Who knew?!

This is the first place that we ever tried a Pusser’s Painkiller.  I know you can only get a real genuine one at the Soggy Dollar Bar on Jost Van Dyke Island in the British Virgin Islands.  But I think this recipe is as authentic as you can get, and it is delicious!  We enjoyed a couple of drinks and visited with other patrons, then headed back up Duval.

It was a good day.  Key West will certainly be a completely different kind of week than the resort that we enjoyed in Marathon.  It will be lively and fun, with lots to see, do, and watch.  In the meantime, we batoned down the hatches, brought everything inside that we don’t want to get wet or blow away, zipped down all the flybridge windows.  We double checked all the lines since we are on fixed docks, and there will be up to three feet of tidal changes, along with the big giant wind and rain that is coming.  We will be staying inside tomorrow!