It’s been an amazing week! Diving by day, swinging in the hammocks in the afternoon, sitting at anchor for the night- this is what I have looked forward to as a cruiser! We”re in a remarkably good stretch of weather, too, that looks like it will last at least until next weekend. Since Monday we’ve made relatively short jaunts on solar and battery only, no generators running, just the quiet whir of the electric motors, and the sound of the sea. Peace.
We did in fact arrive at Elliott Key as planned. There had to have been 200 boats of all sizes anchored up there! We’d read it was a popular spot for day use and they were right. Most were small power boats right up at the shore and they cleared out around sunset. The next morning, Dave counted about 60 that had stayed the night. We were so far away from the fray that it didn’t bother us, except all the wakes as the boats left. The night was calm and quiet.
The next morning, Sunday, we had a leisurely breakfast before starting our short cruise to the west side of Angelfish Creek off the NW corner of Key Largo. This was our staging area to head to the Atlantic side the next day. Upon arrival, we first anchored in 6 feet of water so we could haul out the hookah and scrape the parts of Lady’s underside that we couldn’t reach from the surface. I’d helped scrape her from the surface back at Peck Lake but couldn’t really see what I was doing. My goodness was she furry! Dave’s earlier analogy to a 2” shag carpet was definitely appropriate. I don’t know if it was exhaustion from the sequence of long days of cruising, but neither of us thought to put on gloves this time, or our dive skins. Fortunately, I only ended up with a few minor barnacle scrapes, which I tended to as soon as we finished the job. Dave scraped off something, probably a young anemone, that stung him and gave him an annoying rash and itchiness for the rest of the day. Lucky for him it was gone by morning. That’ll teach us…maybe. We moved further offsore for the night to avoid the bugs that mangroves inevitably house, and spent a quiet night at anchor.
Monday morning we headed off just after breakfast for our first dive site on the Atlantic side of Key Largo in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. There are numerous Sanctuary Preservation Areas (SPAs) in Pennekamp and the adjacent, and sometimes overlapping, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Pennekamp and NOAA have installed mooring bouys at these reefs to reduce anchoring that can damage coral. The more popular the site, the more moorig balls. If you have to anchor, you have to find a patch of sand to do so. The reefs closer to the islands are shallower and more like nurseries with many juvenile and small adult fish. The further offshore and closer to the Florida Straits, the bigger and deeper the corals and the fish.
Between Monday and today (Saturday) we made seven dives and did one snorkel. We dove twice at Turtle Rocks on Monday, twice at Basin Hill Shoal on Tuesday, twice at Key Largo Dry Rocks on Wednesday, once at Cannon Patch Thursday. After Dry Rocks on Wednesday we also did a short snorkel at a very shallow and unimpressive area called Grecian Rocks. Should have let that one to the beginners. The dives have all been gorgeous, but our favorite thus far was Key Largo Dry Rocks. This area went from 5-25’ and included the Christ of the Abyss statue, intentionally set there back in 1965. It has a twin in the Mediterranean Sea placed there many years before. I leave you to google it yourself for more information. We made a beeline for the statue so we could spend the rest of the dive enjoying the coral, and enjoy it we did. It was a very healthy reef with several fingers, only a few of which we explored over our two dives. Beautiful! At some point I will sort through all the photos and videos I take on our dives and post them in an album on my FB page (link to right), so stay tuned for those!
I love hookah diving. It’s all the pleasures of diving without the awkwardness of all the gear. I find it so peaceful and relaxing being under the sea. It’s like being IN an aquarium. The fish aren’t in a rush to go anywhere; they’re just hanging out or nibbling on the reef, or slowly moving to the next coral head. The soft corals gently sway in the current. It’s fun to look in the nooks and crannies between coral heads and at their bases to find a particular fish trying to be unnoticed. The more I dive and watch Dave, who is so at ease in under the water, the better I get at “going with the flow”, so to speak, and the more I enjoy just hovering and watching. I could stay there for hours and just watch.
We did take a break from diving yesterday (Friday). After our Thursday morning dive at Cannon Patch, we pulled into the John Pennekamp State Park marina to pump out our holding tanks, fill our water tanks, and sit on a mooring for two nights. This gave us a diving break on Friday and allowed us to do some important boat chores. I did laundry, cleaned the three heads and laundry “room” (formerly the fourth head), vacuumed and then washed the floors and cockpit. Dave replaced the port sump pump, rebuilt the fuel filter system, fixed an external speaker, and defrosted the fridge (that cold plate runs at little too cold and builds up ice), and was finally able to clean up the workshop and put all the tools away (tools he’d been using for two weeks worth of repairs). We were hot, sweaty and exhausted by the late afternoon, so we took a swim, showered and settled in for drinks in the hammocks and enjoyed a leisurely evening. The park is open but with restrictions due to COVID. They’re running their snorkeling boats at 50% capacity, but none of their diving boats (although private dive companies are running), so it was blissfully quiet in the sound where the mooring balls are.
This morning we left the marina around 8:30am and headed for Molasses Reef out on the edge of the Florida Straits. But I’ll save that for my next post.
Stay healthy and take care of each other!
Life on Lady 
It’s great to hear your cruising is going more smoothly now!
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