Flamingo, Florida Bay, Islamorada, and back to Marathon

Our departure from East Cape Canal was a bit hairy! The canal is deep enough, 10'+, but there is a bar across the exit into the sea and the water is very brown. The depth went from 10' to 2' in a short distance, I saw 1.1' flash on the depth sounder and the rudders kicked up but we did not touch the bottom even though it was quite choppy. Once across the bar it was plain sailing once more. The wind was a good 15kts from the north and we quickly picked up speeds exceeding 10kts. This made for a short trip and we were soon tied up at one of Flamingo's docks. They do not charge if you are only staying for a few hours so we had showers, filled up with water and headed out again. An interesting rowboat followed us in; they had just come from Fort Myers FL and were doing some sort of trials in preparation for a circumnavigation.

Ocean going rowboat

Huge flocks of shore birds and white pelicans were feeding on the sandbanks outside the Flamingo Marina as we navigated the channel out. There can be strong cross currents here and one needs to pay careful attention as there is very shallow water on both sides of the channel. From here we made our way south through some quite narrow passes near Murray Key and on to Man-o war Key where we anchored for the night. The water was really clear over sea grass but there didn't seem to be any fish around at all, even the ever present dolphins were nowhere to be seen. Lots of birds though, the island was full of cormorants.

Not the best photo but this is one of many flocks of cormorants leaving Man-o-war Key in the morning.

 Next we sailed on to Rabbit Keys for a night, still clear water and still no fish. I was expecting to see quite a lot of sea life here so this seemed a little strange. Sharon baked a delicious loaf of corn bread in the solar oven while we were sailing today.

Corn bread baked in our solar oven

 

The next morning we sailed to Islamorada to get online again and start processing some of the photos. We anchored off the Lorelei Bar and Restaurant which gets quite lively at night, a big change from the quiet in the Everglades..... good music though.

At 4 am one morning while at anchor during a rain storm, I was just thinking how dry and cosy our little Seawind 24 was when a big squall hit us followed by much wailing of the anchor drag alarm. We scrambled onto the deck in blinding rain and major lightning. By the time we got the engine started and the anchor up we had dragged 1/3 mile between some other boats (also dragging). We headed for the shallow water near some mangroves for some protection and managed to anchor again. We kept the engine in gear to help keep pressure off the anchor as the wind was still blowing in excess of 50kts and the holding here was less than perfect.

I still had a lot of photo editing to do and we had come up with some mods we wanted to do on the boat so we decided to sail back to Marathon City Marina to spend a month on a mooring ball before heading back to the Everglades. A nice downwind sail from Islamorada to the Seven Mile Bridge, managed 8.5kts with the genoa alone. This boat sails so nice!

Next: Trip 2 to the Everglades, White Water Bay.....