Day 233 – at Marina Del Mar, Key Largo, FL - February 24, 2012

We were working on installing more of our boat show purchases when John from Brandy IV invited us to go snorkeling out to Rodriguez Key.  This island is quite close to shore which made it a good choice as we would be taking John’s dinghy to get there.  The waves in Hawk Channel were around a foot tall, so our ride was wet and wild, but we were all laughing and having a great time as the wind and water kept us from getting too hot.  We searched around for a good place to drop anchor – all we could see was lots of seagrass and you are not suppose to anchor in seagrass.  John though there were a couple of wrecks we could check out, but there were other boats anchored around them and we couldn’t find any sand (which is the preferred anchor spot).  We did finally find a small patch of sand and Fred threw the anchor in.  We began getting into our gear and Fred hit the water first.  He got just a few feet away from the dinghy and popped his head up to tell us we had found a wreck.

Upon further examination we decided it was not so much a wreck as perhaps hurricane debris.  There were definitely parts of a boat, but also parts of a trailer.  We speculate that perhaps the boat was strapped on the trailer and the hurricane lifted both the boat and the trailer and floated them out to sea!  The neat thing was that the boat debris made lots of places for fish and lobster to hide, so there was a lot to see.  John lifted up one piece of the boat and found a small shark underneath.  In another spot we found six or seven small lobster.  John was sad that he didn’t have his lobster net with him, but we think all the lobsters we saw were too small to keep.  Lobsters in the ocean are very beautiful – these were kind of sand colored with different colored markings on their backs – and they can swim extremely fast when they want to!

In the early evening we had John and Rita from Brandy IV and Frank and Carrie from Once Around over for drinks and snacks as a send off to John and Rita who are leaving Key Largo tomorrow.  They are getting themselves staged to make the crossing over to the Bahamas – there are a number of Loopers gathering in Fort Lauderdale waiting for the next good travel window to head to Nassau.   We are planning to begin our trek north around March 1.

             Miles: 0           Bridges: 0        Locks: 0