Marathon city Marina

Well, we have left Shark River. All it was, was a bend in the river with lots and lots of bugs as the river exits the Everglades, except there were no bugs. (we got lucky) So we hoisted anchor about 7:15am and headed out into 15 to 20 knots of wind. Good sailing, except it (the wind) and waves were behind us. Cannot sail with the wind straight up the stern. So once again we are motorsailing the 41 miles to Marathon. Crab and lobster season opened here 2 Sundays ago and the crabbers have put out tens of thousands of pots with little Styrofoam marker balls out. You cannot move forward for more than a 30 seconds before you have to dodge a crab pot marker. If you saw one crab pot ball you know it had a sister or a brother near by, sometimes even a whole family. They even have them in the approach and exit of the bridge channel. Boy are they a hazard. The crabbers can teach the Navy on how to lay mines if they've a mind to.


As you can see in the picture we are approaching the Moser Channel Bridge. It is 65 feet high at high tide and we are just about 2 hours after low tide. There is some apprehension on our part about going under the bridge and shearing all my attachments off of the top of the mast as our mast is 63.5 feet. As we went under the bridge, the VHF antenna hit and bent but nothing else did. BUT WAS IT SCARY! We arrived close to 3pm in Boot Key harbor for our mooring ball.

Here in the bottom picture is a view of the boat in Boot Key on the ball. There are not many boats here right now. The harbor can hold 226 boats but I would say that there is less than a third of that here now. Next month the snow birds should be starting to arrive.

We were going to sail up to Melbourne to attend a sailing convention but the weather here is getting stinky again. And if we did go north, we would have to turn around after the convention and head back down this way against the Gulf Stream to go to the Bahamas and that wouldn't be easy. So...we have to make a decision on what to do.

To all our friends in the frigid north, enjoy.