Around Boot Key, Marathon in January

PHOTO LINK –>> https://photos.app.goo.gl/5MSK0lg7XdYfppI42

New Year:

January arrived with a beautiful day, so John and I headed off riding our bikes to Sombrero Beach. About 2/3ds of the way there I got a flat tire. What a pain! Back we walked me pushing my crippled bike. We opted for plan B and took the dingy out for a ride through Sister’s Creek, past Sombrero Beach and through the mangroves. It was a very nice dingy ride, in the mangroves we could see remnants of boats from the damage Irma had caused that had not been removed. In general though there are very few traces of the hurricane, which we are told blew at a sustained 120miles per hour.

The Wolf Super Full Moon

Most evenings we have had the most beautiful sunsets. I have now taken dozens of sunset pics. One evening the moonrise was a special and I managed to get a shot as it rose, before it vanished behind the clouds. This was the first Full Moon of the year is named after howling wolves. In some cultures, it was known as Old Moon, Ice Moon, SnowMoon, and the Moon after Yule. Wolf howl more during the their breeding season in January and February. The Wolf Moon on the night between 1 and 2 January 2018 was also a Super-moon. A Super-moon occurs when the moon appears bigger and brighter in the sky and occurs when the moon becomes full on the same day that it reaches its pedigree, the point in the moon’s elliptical orbit when it is closest to Earth. We were very fortunate to be able to watch the Wolf Super Full Moon rise.

The majority of our time here has been dry with little rain, but with cold, cold, strong, northerly winds. While we enjoy riding our bikes every day to the shops, some of those days have been very challenging riding into 20 – 30 knots winds that are freezing. Chico’s answer to it all is to bury himself under the covers and sleep.

Convinced that we would be able to sail for Cuba shortly after New Year’s day, we hired a car, were given a truck and set off to shop and stock up. We drove to Homestead and enjoyed the day just being able to do something different.

However that wonderful weather window came, but we couldn’t leave. We were stuck here waiting for our new generator to arrive. The Honda generator was ordered on December 18^th from Amazon and basically just vanished. The tracking number was bogus, the company sending it was false and nobody knew where it could have been or if it had been. Anyway long story short, we ordered another this time from the actual Honda dealers and Amazon reimbursed us so all that was lost was time and our chance to sail in good weather. So we are still awaiting reasonable weather!

Celtic Festival

There was a Celtic Festival held in the Community Center, which is adjoined to the marina facilities, and we went along. I am not sure what we expected, but what we found we both totally enjoyed. There were several musical groups playing, Police Pipe and Drum Corps of Florida, the local Celtic followers dressed in their attire and played the bagpipes and drums while marching around. The Screaming Orphans and Albannach were two visiting bands/groups from Ireland and Scotland. There were various craft and food stalls to wander around. There were a group of ladies demonstrating the caber toss, sheaf toss, and heavy hammer tossing, plus a visiting sheepherder, with a few sheep and sheep dogs that put on a display of herding. We ended up spending over half the day at the Celtic fest and found it very entertaining and interesting.

Sombrero Beach and Manatees

John fixed my flat tire and we did ride to Sombrero Beach on another Sunday. On the way we stopped off at a sheltered area next to a canal to watch the Manatees – Sea Cows, they love the shallow sheltered areas and were quite active in this area. I even saw 2 huge ones off our boat in the mooring field. They were swimming on the surface right next to the boat. The day was a lovely sunny one and when we got to Sombrero beach we enjoyed the view of the beach before heading back. Most days we ride our bikes to the shops for basics and many days have been quite challenging riding into 20 – 30 knots of wind coming straight down Overseas Highway. – On the plus side riding back is a breeze!

John had been helping a friend with his engine transmission and doing repairs and maintenance on Aeeshah. I have been getting all sorts of projects completed. Many hundreds of hours of Go Pro footage has been edited, made into “films” and can now be viewed on the video clips page: https://www.aeeshah.com/video-clips/

Plus I finally pulled out my paints and started some artwork. Just simple water-colour painting and I enjoyed the pass-time.

Flea markets and Key’s Deer

Our friends Roland and Leta invited us to go to a couple of flea markets with them. The first one was more focused on boating and fishing gear. John really enjoyed digging around and made some useful purchases. At the second flea market there were general stalls offering everything from plants to foods to junk. That was where I bought my new art set and committed myself to doing artwork.

After the flea market Roland drove around Deer Key showing us where they had owned land and looking for the Key’s Deer. Sure enough he found them right where he said they would be found. They are a very small breed of deer only found wild in the Keys and so very protected.

The Key Deer, member of a sub-species of the Virginia white-tailed deer, is found nowhere else in the world. It is thought that they came to the Keys from the mainland across a long land bridge and were isolated from their relatives, somewhere from 6,000 to 12,000 years ago, when the Wisconsin Glacier melted. The waters rose and divided this land bridge into the islands of the Florida Keys. Small and cute the deer seemed quite used to humans watching them. It was a really enjoyable day out.

We are hoping our time to leave will be in a few days and we will be heading to Cuba. We are fully stocked for several months of independent living away from civilization.

We have enjoyed Marathon and will miss, the great grocery stores, the wifi, a good social scene, bike riding daily and other pleasures in life here, but we sure look forward to exploring again.