It has been windy from the east for several days. Wind plus water equals waves. Our boat got to wallow in following seas on the way there. That was weird. It was a harder-edged trip back, pounding into the oncoming waves. The Key West end of the trip is sheltered by islands all the way out to the Marquesas Keys. It’s shallow and the swells are broken up into chop for that part of the trip. Outside of that, it’s a deep water crossing. Not huge seas; six feet, but a boat making 25 knots (mostly) and a wind blowing 20, made for a lot of unhappy people. I suppose it could have been worse. Only one person had to be taken away by ambulance on our arrival back to port in Key West. Some of us took Dramamine to minimize any motion sickness. Neither Judy nor I suffered any ill-effects from the trip.
The ride over and back was entertaining. It was like a Disneyland ride. Know the rule about moving around on boats? “One hand for yourself, one hand for the boat, at all times.” We got to practice negotiating our way around while holding on to the boat with two hands at all times. We got to ride on the bow while it was calm. Before it got rough we got to go into the wheelhouse and visit with the boat captain. Deb, the tour guide, was helpful in locating and identifying birds; we got two lifers on this trip. The Brown Boobies were perched on navigational markers around the island. When it was time to start back, Deb got the captain to swing the boat out around one of the nearby sand islands, Hospital Key, so we could get the masked boobies. We didn’t get pictures of either bird, but we got good looks at each.
We didn’t really drive the motorhome out into the Gulf of Mexico, but we couldn’t resist putting one more pin in the map for Fort Jefferson:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107013362562471418011.00046ff7cac9ae98ff560&ll=40.313043,-107.314453&spn=30.104187,78.662109&z=4
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