Key west was a little like coming home as we haven’t returned to many of our previous ports of call. Two movies, two pizzas, a tour of the Hemmingway house, two trips to Mallory Square, laundry, provisions, water, and fuel rounded out our actives. 
The Hemmingway house was a joy to visit. It’s very well preserved and presented, complete with beautiful gardens and about 50 polydactyl (double pawed) cats that are all decedents of Hemmingway’s original herd.
We visited Mallory Square for the sunset celebration twice. Susan suggested we go early to watch the whole thing unfold; the slow accumulation of performers, vendors, tourists and cops. It started with a vendors & performers meeting. Spots were assigned and the magic began. We spoke to a senior performer (the Great Rondiene) who’s been performing here for decades.
We left Key West early Sunday morning and made our way out in a light southeasterly breeze accompanied by a small fleet of fishing, sight seeing and dive boats. The beginning of the passage was marked by light airs and lots of ship traffic. We were only making 2 – 3 nmh until we got into the Gulf Stream with its 2 – 3 nmh push to give us a combined speed of 5 – 6 nmh over the ground toward North Carolina.
The calm of the passage not only allowed us time for reading, countless hands of gin and, surprisingly, it was even calm enough to play dominos. It’s funny how the game of dominos is a lot like life. What one does next is based on what has come before, one thing leading logically to the next. Even so, you often start on one track with a well thought-out strategy; invariably things change and you end up heading in another direction. In the game, once the stones are all played out and the dots are counted up, a winner is decided. In life, it’s not so straight forward. In life, it’s the quality of the dots, not the quantity that really matter.
Those first gentle days of the trip also opened a door into the ocean and allowed me hours of time to gaze into its incredible blueness. The shades of blue varied with the time of day and the sky but it was mostly what I would call a deep electric-ocean-blue. The calmness of the surface allowed me to peer deep down where shafts of sunlight played amongst the deeper shades of blue. The depth of the ocean has been compared to the human soul. Because of its tremendous vastness, I think a better comparison would be made to the soul of our planet and everything that lives upon her; all alive and deeper than we fully fathom.
The first few days of the passage were marked by light winds and afternoon thunderstorms. Fortunately we had positioned ourselves 20-30 miles off the coast in order to take advantage of the Gulf Stream. That distance had the unanticipated advantage of putting us just out of reach of the vicious southern Florida thunderstorms. You can see them depicted in the above photo on our chart plotter. We have XM satellite weather ported into our chart plotter which is a great boon for coastal and near offshore passages but it is mostly useless outside of the USA. We also have AIS (automatic identification system) ported into the plotter. AIS shows all the large ships that are within 20-70 miles of our position. Both those systems were incredibly useful during our trip up the coast of Florida. I thought back to when I was a boy and the only piece of electronic equipment we had on board the yawl I crewed on was a tube driven VHF radio that was often broken. It seems that something primitive and solitary has been lost with the acquisition of all this electronic wizardry and the accompanying information that it imparts. It seems the experience of sailing has been paradoxically diminished at the same time that it has been “enhanced” by modern gadgets.
Dawn of the fourth day brought stronger winds (15-20 nmh) and the Gulf Stream picked up to 3 nmh. The wind was against the current causing the seas to form steep waves 6’-8’ high giving what we sailors like to call a lively ride. Needless to say any further domino games were out of the question and holding on became the order of the day. The up side of all this it that we were now making 9-10 nmh “over ground” towards our destination. We saw the water temperature steadily drop during the passage. When we left Key West the water had been 86° and by the time we were in the waters off North Carolina it had come all the way down to 74°.
Dawn on the sixth day found us in light air 60 miles out of Beaufort in blue green water the likes of which I’d never seen before. We motored north and when we came into cell phone range I tried to book us a slip in one of the marinas. Unfortunately our arrival happened to coincide with the start of a big sports fishing tournament and all the marinas were full. No worries; we were able to anchor in Taylor Creek, tucked in behind Carrot Island right in front of Beaufort.
Later we took the dink to explore the area and discovered dozens of wild ponies on Carrot Island just a little south of us.
Wild horses are beautiful and also a fitting metaphor for us at this stage of our lives.
