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Published: April 18th 2010
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Indian Key Historic State Park
That dock is the equivalent of a parking lot! I wake to a sun-filled space. Which surprises me since my mind hadn't let me rest much of the night. I thought I'd be up all too early. But the sun is shining through our porthole, warming our night-chilled bodies, and I do a cramped quick-change into my linen pants and tank-top and I’m on deck. The crew awakens slowly, still recovering from sea-sickness, red-eye flight, worry at the anchor coming unanchored. Eventually the fact that the sun has appeared after the previous clouded day and that we’re on a boat (with our flippy-floppies!) gets us moving enough to blow up the grey dinghy we dragged with us all the way from California (so we didn’t have to pay a renter’s fee since life-boats are mandatory) and gear up to head to Indian Key.
Indian Key is just a dab in the ocean, mangroves and rocks originally, tucked close to the water-horizon, but it got its fame from a Seminole massacre perpetrated on the European-descent colony living there in 1840. They got their fame from the fact that they were scavengers who plundered ship-wrecks…and sometimes still-living ships. Glorified pirates!
The island is now a Historic State Park, the only park
(up to that point at least!) I’ve ever visited that you could only reach by boat. We wander the remnants of the old roads, now delineated by narrow white-sand/rock paths and brown street signs, and read the markers about the three-story storehouse and the rather posh homes that the wealthiest pirates *cough* citizens built. They had planted two types of yucca, Spanish Bayonet and one other that jutted into the paths, sweet acacia with its furry round yellow blooms, and tamarind trees. Sadly the tamarind pods are not yet ripe. Hermit crabs, soft pink and lilac, skitter over the coral-strewn shores, mangroves lift their slender curved roots above the water-line, and an immature bald eagle sits in the shallows casting about for its next meal.
I am on the first dinghy-ride back to the boat which provides endless entertainment since none of the four of us had paddled in such a craft in a long time (if ever). Instead of making a smooth, linear course back to the Trade Wind, we pirouette oh, so gracefully our way back, gradually drifting and circling nearer and nearer until one of us (me) grabs onto the back ladder. Kristy rows back to pick
up the boys and Lauren (only four people could fit in the dinghy at a time) while the rest of us start breakfast.
Then we have our first full day of sailing! The goal is to get us a good distance toward Key West so that the next day we would be able to pull into port before dark. The afternoon is punctuated by long stretches of inactivity where one person mans the wheel and the rest of us lounged, enjoying the sun despite the lingering coolness in the wind, and read. I even take the helm at one point, my tippy-fears allayed by the smoothness of today’s waters. James points out a far-distant dot which later proves to be a tower rising out of the waters, marking some old ship-wreck or shallows, and I aim for that. This boat steers just like a car (turning left means going left, right means right) but despite knowing that, I automatically steer the opposite way. Which makes me wonder how imbedded my movie-images of sailing are; I can only assume my automatic reflex reflects the way I’ve seen actors steer in period-piece pirate or ocean travel movies. To keep my heading/bearing (?),
I use that slender dark spot on the horizon, the compass (James tells me around what degrees we should be heading) and the GPS that tracks our course. Pretty easy on a calm day.
“There’s water down here!”
Angee’s announcement from below deck gets James’ attention and he pops down below to find the source. I can see it sloshing about, a thin dark layer against the wood paneling of the common room. The source is coming from the aft-bedroom. James lifts the carpets and the trap-door that is underneath the bed-cushions. Turns out there is a slow trickle coming in underneath the bed and filling the pump chamber underneath the carpet. James skitters about, smiling big, “A leak! This is exciting!” We’ve been sailing for several hours and a leak that is just now occurring doesn’t seem to be a big problem. So we form an assembly line and start bailing until we’re satisfied the water won’t go over the pump again.
Twenty minutes later James checks the pump chamber. It has filled up again.
Two hours later, we’ve changed course and are heading hell-bent-for-leather to Marathon, a town with a City Marina where the owner of the boat
can come assess what’s gone wrong. Marathon is an hour farther than we had planned to sail. We’re racing against time and every fifteen minutes we bail another five or six buckets of water from the pump chamber. The leak is steady now.
The sun passes below the horizon as we take down the sails, hastily wrap them up and start motoring into Marathon. We watch for the green flash but no dice. No dice at all in fact that night. We’re feeling good because we still have some light and we’re almost there. There is a channel flanked by short mangroves that leads us into port and Angee is reading the signals on the map, James’ steering, the rest of us ready for orders. I pop down below for a jacket and when I come up again I’ve realized the boat has stopped. We’ve run aground.
There’s a flurry as three people look at the charts but we’ve done nothing wrong. Even at low tide, it shouldn’t be this shallow. James rushes back and forth looking more and more harassed. We coordinate enough to manage one group jump on the left side of the boat and the boat rocks
off the sandy bottom. YAY!!!!
It’s fully dark now and we realize that our headlight for the boat doesn’t work so all we have now is a dinky spotlight. There’s no mention of trying to find a buoy to “park” at in the marina; we just want to tie up at the dock and figure things out in daylight. Sailing after dark is not allowed after all, except in emergencies. Lights from the town and other boats distract us, making it hard to see the shapes belonging to the lights. We learn that day markers are called day markers for a reason. Those red and green signs set up on posts with helpful numbers that tell you your way? We can only read them if our spotlight is directly on them or if we’re less than a few meters away. We call out the numbers we can see to Angee but at one point we call out a number that is
NOT ON THE MAP.
“What?! Are you sure? Not on the map? Really? But I just saw it! She saw it too! It’s not on here, I swear!”
Shuh-shhhhhhhhh. We’ve run aground again.
Fast forward again: the owner has
The leak
This was when it was still exciting...aka the first time we bailed five buckets out of the bottom of our boat come by promising to send a mechanic in the morning, three separate dinghies have come by to politely inform us we’ve run aground, one dinghy driver was actually helpful (thank you Jameson!), and we’re taking shifts to stay awake in case the boat shifts free before high tide. Which is at 3:00 AM. Kristy and I play cards until I start getting a tired head-ache, shake Angee awake, and then I collapse into bed only to be awakened again in the dead of night. The boat’s free and we start to motor to the dock (which James and Scott scouted out in our dinghy) but fortuitously, we see an empty spot. On the second pass, Lauren grabs the rope attached to the buoy with a special hook. We tie up and pass out.
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