Sailing to Fort Jefferson

We got up way too early Wednesday morning with every intention of getting an early start out to Fort Jefferson. If you recall we had to use a second anchor to keep our boat from hitting one of the boats on a mooring. During the night the boat did a loop-de-loop because of the changing tide and a new wind, resulting in one anchor line running behind the boat and on top of the rudder. By the time we had the lines untangled and both anchors on the boat the sun was already up - so much for our early start. We did see dolphins swimming through the anchorage though, which I took to be a good sign. We motored for about an hour, mainly to put some charge back in the batteries. By then the wind had filled in nicely and we had a nice sail all the way to Garden Key, 63.5 nautical miles. On the way we saw half a dozen sea turtles. They were around 2 feet in diameter, and swimming just at the surface. They would dive as we got close, so no pictures. We were surprised to find no other boats when we arrived and we had seen no boats coming back from Fort Jefferson. We had the place all to ourselves. That night the winds switched around and created a nasty swell in the anchorage that made us roll back and forth all night long. 

Some of the 16 million bricks, and the wonderful details.

First thing Thursday morning we noticed that a trawler had come in after dark and within the next 2 hours 4 more boats came in. The trawler had come down from Naples, FL, and one of the sailboats had come non-stop from Marathon. We took the dinghy ashore before the tour boat arrived so we had the fort to ourselves for a while. Then we tagged along on a tour once the paying tourists got there. We figured we saved about $300 by bringing our own boat down from Michigan. There was lots of coral washed up on shore from all the big winds that had kept us wind bound in Key West, but no Cuban boats this time. When we were here in 2007 there 4 or 5 “boats” on shore that people had made to cross over from Cuba, about 90 miles away. Pretty amazing that they had made it and pretty sad that they had felt the need to take the risk.

These boats made it the 90 miles from Cuba.
You have to wonder how many didn't.

We had planned to come back to Key West Friday, based on the weather forecast. But by now you know how that often works. Winds were 15 to 20 from the east. We spent the day doing a few projects we have been putting off, reading, visiting the other boats, and going back in the fort for a good SPOT fix.