Keys vacation - part 3.
Mar. 24th, 2002 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivka"Rivka, you went on vacation to the keys? I had totally forgotten about that." "Never mind that. I'm going to finish this trip report if it takes until January."
Sunday
Sunday we had another big day planned. At the Wild Bird Center, Debbie and I had picked up a flyer for Big Pine Kayak Adventures, which offered "backcountry eco-tours" in the less-inhabited middle keys, about sixty miles from where we were staying in Key Largo. So we got up very early (not quite early enough, as it turned out) and made our way south and west. Looking at the map, we thought we'd be travelling through twelve other keys on our way to Big Pine Key. The actual number was probably twice that. There are dozens of keys not big enough to appear in the guidebook - some amounting to nothing more than a strip of sand and some scrub trees, only a few feet wider than U.S. 1 on each side. We began to understand why the middle keys aren't very built-up. You could often see the ocean on both sides of the road, dazzling turquoise shading almost to green, dotted with smaller keys. And once, a seven-mile bridge stretching across the water, with fragments of an older highway bridge still standing in the water off to one side.
We hadn't allowed enough time for slow roads, nor for the warren of tiny roads between the mile marker we were watching for and the kayak launch point, so we got there at around 9:05. The four other tour group members and extremely laid-back long-haired guide were waiting for us, and patiently waited some more while we slathered on the sunscreen and got ourselves situated. It was all double kayaks, open rather than enclosed. (This is foreshadowing for the part where we get very wet.) We practiced paddling around the boat launch until we'd figured out how to go forward and how to turn, and then headed out across a channel to No Name Key, a small uninhabited key given over to wilderness.
I knew that the keys had very shallow water, but I hadn't imagined that for much of the kayaking trip we'd be in foot-deep water. Instead of dipping our paddles deep into clean blue water, we were pretty routinely contending with sea grass and scuffing up sand from the bottom. This turned out to have its advantages, in terms of wildlife, but it was a mite disappointing as far as atmosphere was concerned. It also meant that we had a tendency to ground. For a while, in an especially shallow area with a clear sandy bottom, I got out and walked along, towing Misha behind me in the kayak. We did see lots of wildlife, once I'd adjusted my expectations from the big and dramatic to the small and dramatic. What I thought were rocks, for example, turned out to be sponges. I'd never really gotten a close-up look at a living sponge. Weirdly, they're animals, and the thing you wash with is, well, its skeleton. And we saw jellyfish - both tiny transparent ones like a bit of clear plastic, and opaque spotted ones that, resting on their backs, just looked like a suspiciously round piece of the bottom. And the largest single-celled organism I'd ever seen, the mermaid's cup.
It was neat, but not necessarily worth driving so far... until suddenly the guide had us stop at a place where there was a narrow gap between the mangroves thickly lining the shore. "I'm going to see if I can work my way in." And a few moments later he was back, and beckoning to us. "This is going to be worthwhile even if we have to back out. Put your paddles down - you're going to have to pull yourself along with your hands." And into the mangrove channel we went, deep into the interior of No Name Key.
In places, we could paddle. In places, we did have to pull ourselves along by the twisted raised roots of the mangroves. It was dim and shadowed and still. There was no way through, except by kayak. You couldn't bring a larger boat, or even a canoe - in places, both edges of the kayak scraped the roots as we went by. You couldn't go on foot, as the canopy closed overhead. The world was dappled green and brown. Tiny crabs scuttled along the mangrove roots. The water beneath us was thick with the elegant spotted jellyfish. Hermit crabs in conch shells clung to underwater roots. I could see why mangroves are described as "walking," drawn up as if stepping through the water.
And then, in the heart of the key, the channel ended in a pool large enough to turn around. We worked our way out again, across the channel in the now-welcome breeze, and our tour was over.
We'd debated what to do with the afternoon. We were hoping to see key deer at sunset, in their refuge on Big Pine Key. Key deer are tiny - two to three feet high at the shoulder - descendants of white-tailed deer, and there are only three hundred of them in the world, all in the middle keys. While we were waiting for sunset, we thought we'd have lunch and then spend a relaxing afternoon at Bahia Honda State Park. Lunch was all right - I had a blackened steak sandwich and a marinated mushroom salad, and they were good but not earth-shattering - but we drove ten miles back up the road to find that the state park was full. So instead we drove down into Key West.
Our original plan had been to make our trip early in March, and thus avoid spring break. We didn't quite make it. Key West was full of college students zipping recklessly around on rented mopeds, getting drunk by noon, and buying T-shirts with condom jokes on them. We edged our way through town, past a dreadful spring-break-style beach (a narrow, shadeless strip between the road and the ocean, rife with bodies and loud music and carts vending beer and hot dogs), feeling more and more nervous about our intended destination, Fort Zachary Taylor beach. Fortunately, our fears were (as we say in my family) almost groundless. The $5-per-car admission fee to Fort Zach meant that the college kids had gone elsewhere, and we found a pleasantly uncrowded sandy beach at the very tip of the island. We spent a lazy afternoon there swimming, lying in the sun, and watching pelicans making their ungainly dives for food.
Near sunset, we made our way back to Big Pine Key and the Key Deer Refuge. We thought we'd have the best chance of seeing deer at an old quarry site called the Blue Hole, the deer's only source of fresh water. What we didn't expect to see there was an alligator, about five feet long, perched right below the wildlife viewing platform and looking up us expectantly. We also saw turtles and a green-backed heron, but the key deer never emerged even though we waited in silence for about a half an hour. Even so, the stillness and quiet felt good.
Debbie decided that she'd had enough for one day, so Misha and I went out for sushi for dinner. Remember what I said about the unnaturally large portion sizes in the Keys? The sushi restaurant was not immune. It was breathtaking. We got to try some fish we'd never had before as sushi, such as wahoo (strangely smooth texture, mild flavor) and mahi mahi. We had the freshest, most flavorful hamachi I have ever tasted. I'll never think of it as a mild fish again. I had some strong-flavored spicy conch, and we finished the meal out with meltingly good salmon and tuna. All of this in a Japanese restaurant done in a Florida-tourist motif, weathered grey panelling and all.
We determined that we weren't going to do a damned thing the next day, and went home to bed.
Sunday
Sunday we had another big day planned. At the Wild Bird Center, Debbie and I had picked up a flyer for Big Pine Kayak Adventures, which offered "backcountry eco-tours" in the less-inhabited middle keys, about sixty miles from where we were staying in Key Largo. So we got up very early (not quite early enough, as it turned out) and made our way south and west. Looking at the map, we thought we'd be travelling through twelve other keys on our way to Big Pine Key. The actual number was probably twice that. There are dozens of keys not big enough to appear in the guidebook - some amounting to nothing more than a strip of sand and some scrub trees, only a few feet wider than U.S. 1 on each side. We began to understand why the middle keys aren't very built-up. You could often see the ocean on both sides of the road, dazzling turquoise shading almost to green, dotted with smaller keys. And once, a seven-mile bridge stretching across the water, with fragments of an older highway bridge still standing in the water off to one side.
We hadn't allowed enough time for slow roads, nor for the warren of tiny roads between the mile marker we were watching for and the kayak launch point, so we got there at around 9:05. The four other tour group members and extremely laid-back long-haired guide were waiting for us, and patiently waited some more while we slathered on the sunscreen and got ourselves situated. It was all double kayaks, open rather than enclosed. (This is foreshadowing for the part where we get very wet.) We practiced paddling around the boat launch until we'd figured out how to go forward and how to turn, and then headed out across a channel to No Name Key, a small uninhabited key given over to wilderness.
I knew that the keys had very shallow water, but I hadn't imagined that for much of the kayaking trip we'd be in foot-deep water. Instead of dipping our paddles deep into clean blue water, we were pretty routinely contending with sea grass and scuffing up sand from the bottom. This turned out to have its advantages, in terms of wildlife, but it was a mite disappointing as far as atmosphere was concerned. It also meant that we had a tendency to ground. For a while, in an especially shallow area with a clear sandy bottom, I got out and walked along, towing Misha behind me in the kayak. We did see lots of wildlife, once I'd adjusted my expectations from the big and dramatic to the small and dramatic. What I thought were rocks, for example, turned out to be sponges. I'd never really gotten a close-up look at a living sponge. Weirdly, they're animals, and the thing you wash with is, well, its skeleton. And we saw jellyfish - both tiny transparent ones like a bit of clear plastic, and opaque spotted ones that, resting on their backs, just looked like a suspiciously round piece of the bottom. And the largest single-celled organism I'd ever seen, the mermaid's cup.
It was neat, but not necessarily worth driving so far... until suddenly the guide had us stop at a place where there was a narrow gap between the mangroves thickly lining the shore. "I'm going to see if I can work my way in." And a few moments later he was back, and beckoning to us. "This is going to be worthwhile even if we have to back out. Put your paddles down - you're going to have to pull yourself along with your hands." And into the mangrove channel we went, deep into the interior of No Name Key.
In places, we could paddle. In places, we did have to pull ourselves along by the twisted raised roots of the mangroves. It was dim and shadowed and still. There was no way through, except by kayak. You couldn't bring a larger boat, or even a canoe - in places, both edges of the kayak scraped the roots as we went by. You couldn't go on foot, as the canopy closed overhead. The world was dappled green and brown. Tiny crabs scuttled along the mangrove roots. The water beneath us was thick with the elegant spotted jellyfish. Hermit crabs in conch shells clung to underwater roots. I could see why mangroves are described as "walking," drawn up as if stepping through the water.
And then, in the heart of the key, the channel ended in a pool large enough to turn around. We worked our way out again, across the channel in the now-welcome breeze, and our tour was over.
We'd debated what to do with the afternoon. We were hoping to see key deer at sunset, in their refuge on Big Pine Key. Key deer are tiny - two to three feet high at the shoulder - descendants of white-tailed deer, and there are only three hundred of them in the world, all in the middle keys. While we were waiting for sunset, we thought we'd have lunch and then spend a relaxing afternoon at Bahia Honda State Park. Lunch was all right - I had a blackened steak sandwich and a marinated mushroom salad, and they were good but not earth-shattering - but we drove ten miles back up the road to find that the state park was full. So instead we drove down into Key West.
Our original plan had been to make our trip early in March, and thus avoid spring break. We didn't quite make it. Key West was full of college students zipping recklessly around on rented mopeds, getting drunk by noon, and buying T-shirts with condom jokes on them. We edged our way through town, past a dreadful spring-break-style beach (a narrow, shadeless strip between the road and the ocean, rife with bodies and loud music and carts vending beer and hot dogs), feeling more and more nervous about our intended destination, Fort Zachary Taylor beach. Fortunately, our fears were (as we say in my family) almost groundless. The $5-per-car admission fee to Fort Zach meant that the college kids had gone elsewhere, and we found a pleasantly uncrowded sandy beach at the very tip of the island. We spent a lazy afternoon there swimming, lying in the sun, and watching pelicans making their ungainly dives for food.
Near sunset, we made our way back to Big Pine Key and the Key Deer Refuge. We thought we'd have the best chance of seeing deer at an old quarry site called the Blue Hole, the deer's only source of fresh water. What we didn't expect to see there was an alligator, about five feet long, perched right below the wildlife viewing platform and looking up us expectantly. We also saw turtles and a green-backed heron, but the key deer never emerged even though we waited in silence for about a half an hour. Even so, the stillness and quiet felt good.
Debbie decided that she'd had enough for one day, so Misha and I went out for sushi for dinner. Remember what I said about the unnaturally large portion sizes in the Keys? The sushi restaurant was not immune. It was breathtaking. We got to try some fish we'd never had before as sushi, such as wahoo (strangely smooth texture, mild flavor) and mahi mahi. We had the freshest, most flavorful hamachi I have ever tasted. I'll never think of it as a mild fish again. I had some strong-flavored spicy conch, and we finished the meal out with meltingly good salmon and tuna. All of this in a Japanese restaurant done in a Florida-tourist motif, weathered grey panelling and all.
We determined that we weren't going to do a damned thing the next day, and went home to bed.
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no subject
Date: 2002-03-24 09:06 pm (UTC)We paddled around near the dock, learning to coordinate and to steer, and I was amazed at how easy it actually was. We never did get to be professional-quality, but we were certainly capable of getting around to where we wanted to be... sooner or later. I was also amazed at how easy it was to get into a rhythm; I had been expecting to come away with burning shoulder muscles and arm cramps, but I hardly even broke a sweat. Color me amazed. :)
I'll just echo what was said earlier about the mangroves: it was amazing to work your way back in there, and see so much life. If you ever get a chance to take a tour like that, leap on it.
I thought it was hilarious that the alligator we saw in the Key deer refuge was plainly watching the viewing platform... with a shiny U.S. quarter in the water right in front of him. I thought he had arranged that as bait, and was disappointed that his bait wasn't bringing in unwary tourists. Nobody else seemed to find this as funny as I did, and I'm not sure I want to know what that says about me.
The sushi place was a blast; it was attached to a motel, and I thought at first that it would be up to the usual standards of motel restaurants; i.e., it would be God-awful. Nope, not even close. It wasn't as good as Kaz Sushi Bistro, but it was still a really good sushi joint. Two thumbs up!
no subject
Date: 2002-03-25 10:18 am (UTC)Good to hear you weighing in on the trip. And as for suuuushi ... it seems I'll get to enjoy it with you in a *very short time*, now.
-grinningJ