Key Largo Dry Rocks and Christ of the Abyss

From our sugar scoop I lowered myself into the water with my dive gear on, submerged, turned around and gasped, yes through my regulator. The reef at Key Largo Dry Rocks was gorgeous! There were fish everywhere, from the top of the water column down to the ocean floor. There were large coral heads with zillions of soft corals and sponges. The lighting was perfect and the visibility excellent. I felt like I was diving in a giant aquarium.

We’d gone to Key Largo Dry Rocks to do the touristy thing and see the Christ of the Abyss statue. So after taking in that astounding first view of the reef, we set out to find the statue. Twenty minutes later we found it. This 9-foot bronze statue sits in 25 feet of water about 3 nm off the coast of Key Largo at Key Largo Dry Rocks in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. It was placed there in 1965, one of three such statues in the world cast from the mold created by Guido Galletti. The original is in the Mediterranean off San Fruttuoso on the Italian Riviera. The other is off the coast of St. George’s Grenada (I look forward to diving at this one when we finally get to Grenada). We took the obligatory photos and moved on to exploring the reef.

Although the statue is what brought us to that particular spot, we ended up being treated to the best dive of the dozen or so places we dove in August. Nature laid out this reef as a series of fingers, the fingers being lines of large corn heads separated by sandy gullies. There was so much to see and in our two dives on the reef that day we hardly covered it all. There were fish above, around and hiding beneath the coral heads. It was an underwater wonderland!

My camera barely does it justice, but the clip below is the best of what I caught on video. No music this time, just the sounds of me breathing through the regulator. Enjoy!

Basin Hill Shoals

True to form, once I get back to land I settle into my land routine pretty quickly and lose the desire to post to my blog, which is really about living aboard, which I’m not doing right now. But in some recent past post I promised stories and pictures about our dives, so here’s the first such post. I’ll post about a different dive every week or two. This is my way of milking things until we get back to the boat some time in January. Who am I kidding, I’m thoroughly enjoying sorting through the images and creating videos and slideshows to share.

Basin Hill Shoals was one of four reef areas we dove in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. This was our second dive. Our first dive was at Turtle Rocks, but it was my first dive in quite a while and I needed to get used to maneuvering around the corals without damaging them before trying to also manage a camera. I’m not very good at judging distance on land or under water, so it takes me a while, and some floundering, to figure out how close to the coral I actually am.

John Pennekamp park was established in 1963 as the first undersea park in the United States. It and the adjacent Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) contain the only reef in the Continental U.S. Their main purpose is to preserve and protect this reef. John Pennekamp park extends about 25 nm down Key Largo and out about 3 nm where it meets the marine sanctuary. We did several dives in FKNMS as well and I will post information and pictures of those later.

Various diving/snorkeling locations in both John Pennekamp and the FKNMS are marked with mooring balls, which they ask folks to use instead of anchoring. If the balls are full, one must anchor in a sand patch away from coral and sea grass. Due to the pandemic we were always able to get a mooring ball; their snorkeling trips are limited and they are not running their dive tours, although several local private dive tours are running at reduced capacity.

The reefs in Pennekamp are fairly shallow, 5-20′. Most of them still had their mooring balls, but a couple didn’t, so we didn’t dive those. These were fairly small reefs and because they are shallow they are really “nursery” reefs with mostly juvenile rather than the larger adults. There were lots of beautiful soft corals gently waving in the currents. So now I will let the images speak for themselves. Enjoy!

Poof- back in NH!

We got back to our land home last night after two days of driving and one night in a hotel. The temperature today is in the low 70s and I am wearing jeans and a light long sleeve shirt and not dripping sweat sitting still. I’m so happy! Being on the Atlantic side of the Keys was lovely, but being in the ICW and marina was almost unbearable. I will not miss the inhospitable late summer weather of southern Florida.

You will recall from my last post that our starboard battery bank and generator had both shut down and the port throttle was intermittently cutting out the port motor. Well, the port throttle finally failed entirely on Sunday morning and could not be revived. So we made the final sprint to Fort Pierce with just the starboard motor being driven by the port generator (just once in the morning until the batteries were fully charged), the port batteries and both solar arrays. Again, thank goodness for the redundancy Dave built into our system! We arrived just at slack tide, and with a couple of dock hands to assist, Dave parked her in our slip easily despite having only one motor. It would have been a lot more challenging if we’d missed slack tide. We took the rest of the afternoon off.

We spent Monday and Tuesday closing up Lady, which left us extremely sweaty and exhausted by each afternoon when we broke around 4pm for drinks. Monday evening I drove to Jupiter to meet my cousin and her daughter for a lovely outdoor dinner along the Indian River. We all needed some girl time and it was great! I left Dave in the hammock with a drink and music; I think he also napped for a bit. We’d met a couple of new friends at the marina in July and were able to spend a few hours with them Tuesday afternoon having socially distanced fruity rum drinks on the docks followed by dinner up the road, again at an outside venue where the tables were more than adequately spaced and the staff all wore their masks (properly, not on their chins). It was a good way to end our time at the marina.

Every time I come back from an extended stay on Indigo Lady, I am struck by the colors and textures of the interior of my house. It feels so foreign for the first few hours. Indigo Lady is predominantly white inside and out. She has a dull medium blue/black mottled laminate floor and countertops, dark blue pleather salon cushions and nondescript gray cockpit cushions. I’ve added colored bed sheets and some brown baskets but other than that she’s pretty much bright white fiberglass. I don’t mind all that bright whiteness when I’m on her; she complements the bright skies and waters. I would find that much white disconcerting in my land home in NH; it would not be the least bit relaxing. Here on land I like my cozy, earthy greens, yellow and garnet with the hardwood floors and cherry cabinets.

Late this morning we took a ride out to the Kittery Trading Post for their annual tent sale and stopped at an “honor system” farm stand on the way home. Now I have fresh eggs, heirloom tomatoes for canning salsa, plus some fresh veggies to go with dinner the next few nights. We brought some food back from the boat and we’d left our pantry here pretty well stocked, so I can put off going to the market until Monday.  

A tour of our yard today revealed that the rodents have left us two apples and about 1/3 cup of Jacob’s cattle beans, just enough to plant next year. It looks like they also may have eaten the heads off of whatever black-eyed Susans managed to bloom. The drought was not kind to my perennial beds. I hope they revive next year! My hardier herbs- sage, rosemary, thyme and oregano- survived nicely and some small green parsley shoots are hanging on. Still, the air is crisp and the area sugar maples are starting to turn color. Although technically still summer, fall is in the air- my favorite time of year! 

Now that we’re home I will take time to reflect on the trip and share my thoughts with you here over the next few posts. I’ll try to keep it balanced between the “ooh, ahh, look at this” stuff from our diving excursions and the realities of my continued efforts to learn to love living aboard.

Until then, stay safe and take care of each other!

Here we go again…

We are en route back to Fort Pierce, bringing this little excursion to an end. We expect to arrive midday Sunday. We are currently anchored just off the ICW a few miles north of Jupiter Inlet. We thoroughly enjoyed our time on the Atlantic side of Biscayne Bay, Elliott Key and Key Largo. I will share more about that in a future post, but at the moment I need to vent. 

I’m tired of our systems malfunctioning! Yes, it’s happening again. At least when a diesel engine dies, Dave can fix it, even if he has to wait for parts. He can do some troubleshooting of our solar electric systems, but most of our issues are design or programming issues that require repair or reprogramming by the company that made the part. In February we installed two each of “upgraded” battery, solar and generator controllers. These upgrades were meant to ensure we didn’t have another catastrophic double system failure like the one last November that left us disabled 80nm offshore of Georgia. We returned to Florida this summer in the midst of a pandemic not only as a getaway from direct contact with humans, but also because we needed to install our replacement LiFePO4 batteries (from Sweden) and our repaired throttle (from Finland). We finally left Fort Pierce on August 3rd hopeful that our systems would finally be reliable, and they were…until 3 days ago. 

We were back in the ICW, two days into the trek back to Fort Pierce. First, our newly repaired throttle started intermittently cutting out on the port side. If you don’t speak boat, no throttle means no motor. This had been happening on the starboard side in March, which is what prompted our sending it to Finland for repair. They were supposed to have also replaced the port part of the mechanism, and we did get charged for that, but apparently something went wrong. That in itself is annoying, but not stressful because we still had a reliable starboard system…until today. For some reason we do not yet completely understand, the starboard generator over-amped the batteries, resulting in the battery control box shutting down the batteries followed by the generator shutting down and losing communication with the system as well. Dave replaced one of the battery box fuses, and it immediately burned out again. He couldn’t get the batteries to come back on nor get the generator to wake up. This of course happened just as we were passing the Lake Worth Inlet, which is past the last decent anchorage for the next 3 miles! We found a tight place near a marina to drop the hook while Dave tried to trouble shoot further, which included a call to one of guys who has been helping us with our systems all along. Oh, and note the date- it’s Friday. So the European companies we need to talk were already closed for the weekend by the time this all happened, so they won’t even get Dave’s emails until Monday morning. 

After a quick lunch, Dave turned on the cross ship cable so that we could run both motors off the port generator and battery bank and our complete solar array. We’ve done this before and it works well. Thank goodness Dave decided we should have two redundant systems, which allows us to crosswire them this way, otherwise we would have been stranded, again. While underway with this cross ship setup, about 2 hours after shutting itself down, the starboard generator’s communication display suddenly woke up of its own accord. We left well enough alone and Dave will test it tomorrow when we get underway. We still had to contend with the glitchy port throttle, and it did need coaxing to restart several times, but we finally got to tonight’s anchorage and we should make it to Fort Pierce (fingers crossed). Today was our longest jump, 26nm. The next two days are 17nm and 15nm. I’ll breathe easier when we’re tied up to the dock in our slip!

Interim Blog Post

We’re anchored in a lovely patch of sand about 3nm off Elliott Key. We came down this way after Tropical Storm Laura passed to resume diving. This time we’re diving the wrecks of the Biscayne Bay National Park Maritime Heritage Trail.

I said we’re anchored 3nm offshore, which means weak cell signal. (I hope the picture posts.) So this is all you get for now. Tuesday we’ll start dubbing our way back to Fort Pierce City Marina. I’ll post something more exciting when we have better cell signal.

Until then, stay safe and take care of each other.

Interim Blog Post

We’re anchored in a lovely patch of sand about 3nm off Elliott Key. We came down this way after Tropical Storm Laura passed to resume diving. This time we’re diving the wrecks of the Biscayne Bay National Park Maritime Heritage Trail.

I said we’re anchored 3nm offshore, which means weak cell signal. (I hope the picture posts.) So this is all you get for now. Tuesday we’ll start dubbing our way back to Fort Pierce City Marina. I’ll post something more exciting when we have better cell signal.

Until then, stay safe and take care sold each other.

Yes, it is hurricane season.

We were enjoying diving the reefs of John Pennekamp and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Then along came tropical depression 13, now known as Tropical Storm Laura. Being a slow boat, we can’t wait until a storm and its track are well defined, so as soon as the tropical wave we’d been tracking became Tropical Depression 13 that looked like it could impact the Keys, we started heading north.

We got as far as Oleta River State Park near North Beach Miami yesterday (Friday) when Laura’s track starting resolving to something likely to affect the Keys (maybe) and then the Gulf of Mexico, but not Miami. So rather than continue to Fort Pierce and our slip at the hurricane 3-rated marina, we anchored off the state park last night and will stay here until it looks safe to travel back to Biscayne Bay, possibly tomorrow, maybe as late as Tuesday.

For an urban park , this isn’t a bad anchorage. We even dinghied ashore after breakfast for a lovely though hot walk- my first time ashore in 17 days! The anchorage has great protection, but with a lovely breeze. The downside? It’s party central today (Saturday)! It was quite nice yesterday- lots of boats hanging out for the day, but relatively quiet considering. Today looked promising until after lunch when a couple of boats showed up who feel compelled to share their playlists with the greater Miami area. Egads, turn down your damned music! They know they’re being bad, too, because when one of the police boats shows up on one of their checks, the music magically gets turned down, for about 15 minutes! Fortunately they don’t look like overnight boats, so I expect (hope!) to see them leave around sunset.

Alas, beggars can’t be choosers. If we’d had to return to Fort Pierce marina that would have ended our trip and we would have driven home right away. Staying here allows us to return to Biscayne Bay if not the Florida Keys once the storm passes on Monday. So we should get about another week of QUIET anchorages and some diving before we have to start the trip back to Fort Pierce marina and head home.

We check the National Hurricane Center’s and Chris Parker’s updates several times a day. We’re praying tomorrow looks good for returning to a quieter anchorage on the north end of Biscayne Bay, but we won’t let the insanely loud music here drive our decision, although it is tempting. I have to keep telling myself it’s temporary. I’m actually hoping the weather tomorrow is rainy so these people don’t come back. Yup, it’s that loud.

We’re just glad that this storm is tracking where it is so we don’t have to end our trip early. Loud music and all, we are thankful. And there is some interesting people watching here. Lord help us if we have to stay here tomorrow because I don’t know how much more loud music we can take! 😳

Oleta River State Park is the largest urban state park in Florida. They are open despite COVID, with the typical social distancing and mask wearing rules. Their layout is conducive to social distancing, at least for family groups, and people on shore appear to be complying for the most part. People on the little beach seem to be well spaced. We can’t say the same for some of the boats showing up in the anchorage with 12+ people on board, or the others rafting up with each other for the day. Perhaps I should presume good intentions and assume they’re just large family groups.

At any rate, Dave & I have stayed away from close human contact since we left the marina August 5th and plan to continue doing so.

I’ll update later this week. Until then, stay a healthy and take care of each other!

Now THIS is what I signed up for!

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!

From Biscayne Bay

Assuming all goes well over the next 1.5 hours, we should be anchoring somewhere along the northern half of Elliott Key on the east side of Biscayne Bay just in time to sling our hammocks and enjoy a drink before dinner, followed not long after by collapsing in exhaustion. 

This our 4th consecutive day working our way down to Key Largo from Fort Pierce. Making miles is tiring, especially in the southern Florida stretch of the ICW which is quite busy with power boats going fast and waking us. I’m guessing it’s probably less busy than normal due to the pandemic, but less busy is still busy for our slow boat. It got quieter once we put Miami behind us a couple of hours ago and got further into Biscayne Bay. This push to make miles is intentional. We know the weather is clear of tropical storms up to and likely through next weekend at least, and we want to enjoy diving/snorkeling in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, off Key Largo, during that period. If the weather looks clear further than next weekend, we may linger around Key Largo a bit longer and then start back but stop to dive some wrecks in Biscayne Bay. There are several remnants of old wrecks in less than 35’ of water that sound cool and I’ve never dived on a wreck before. If any plausible tropical LO leaves South Africa, we’ll keep an eye on it and head back to Fort Pierce with a little more zest. It’s four days from Biscayne Bay to Fort Pierce and we already know several good places to anchor along the way.

Wednesday, was a slow slog to the Peck Lake Anchorage. The current was against us the entire way and we averaged only about 3 kts. Dave decided to scrape one of the hulls after dinner Wednesday night and do the rest Thursday morning after breakfast and before heading off again. After 90 minutes of scraping the starboard hull as far down as he could reach Wednesday night, he reported that it looked like we had “2-inches of shag carpet glued to our hulls.” Plus the lobster cages and props were covered in barnacles and plant life as well (I believe the phrase “basketball sized gob” was used). So Thursday after breakfast we both donned our swimsuits, grabbed scrapers and went at the port hull, props and cages. Two hours later, around 10am, we were underway and making much better speed! We dropped anchor in West Palm Beach around 4:30pm. We were beat! Thank goodness we had leftover stew, which I had set up in the instant while underway on Wednesday. It was nice to have dinner ready two nights in a row.

Yesterday we were underway by 7am and ate breakfast en route. We had the current at least not against us the entire way, slightly in our favor part of it, and we averaged 4.5 kts. We had some system issues prior to noon (maybe I’ll describe those in another post), but the afternoon saw us cruising comfortably on solar and battery alone. We anchored in Lake Sylvia in Fort Lauderdale by 4:30pm with enough sun left to bring our battery banks back up to over 90% charge. Guess what we did after we anchored? Yup, slung the hammocks and had drinks. We like to be anchored by around 4:30pm so we can indulge in this little ritual, plus have some sun left to recharge batteries- without generators. Last night was so hot and humid that we went for a swim before dinner and ended up eating cheese, crackers, hummus and dried salamis because we were too tired and hot to heat up and eat leftovers.

We were underway again this morning by 7am. We’ve been averaging around 4.5 kts again, with generators running the first half of the day until the sun was high enough to keep up with the draw of the engines. It’s been generator-silent since about noon. I made some corn tortillas after breakfast. Tonight we’ll brown up some beef and spices and have tacos…after a swim and drinks in the hammocks, of course. 

Stay healthy and take care of each other!

On the road again!

Okay, technically we’re on the water again. Our throttle arrived yesterday and Dave immediately installed it. All the boat projects that make the boat go had been completed. So around 9:00am this morning we left the slip, topped off our fuel and were back on the ICW by 9:30am.

It felt so good to be underway again! We didn’t plan the day so well and had the current against us the entire way. In addition to our furry hulls, we averaged about 3 kts, and that was with our motors set for what would otherwise have been about 5.5 kts. Dave will be cleaning the hulls in the morning before we take off.

We are now anchored in Peck Lake, which is really an expanded portion of the Indian River, enjoying a shot of rum before dinner. We anchored as the skies were becoming ominous in the west. The winds kicked up to 20-3ph gusting to 38, but it seems we got a pass on the squall in general. We may yet get some showers; we’ll see.

Stay healthy and take care of each other!

(PS- those showers never materialized.)