Key Biscayne

5/18/2020

We departed the Rodriguez Key anchorage this morning in warm, humid weather, and dodged thunderstorms early in the day.  Again, it was an uneventful trip.

Along the way we passed Boca Chita Key which was once the home of Mark Honeywell, the founder of the company by the same name, and is now a national park.  The island is shown below, but from this distance there isn’t much to see.  We had been to this island before on a chartered training cruise.  The island has a colorful history as told to us by the charter captain.

Honeywell bought this island during the Depression and hired local workers to dig and improve a small harbor, houses and a private lighthouse.  He used the island as a vacation property.  In 1939 he was on the island with his mistress when he saw his boat approaching with his wife aboard.  He quickly bundled the mistress off to a small chapel built on the island, and after his wife arrived they went to bed for the night.  During the night his wife got up and saw a light in the chapel, which led her to confront the mistress.  A fight ensued until both women went up the lighthouse and fell off in their struggle.  The wife was killed, and the mistress permanently paralyzed.  Honeywell paid for the mistress to stay on the island with a nurse until she died sometime during World War II.  The charter captain told us he was once on the island when the park rangers had a building open, and he saw an old wheelchair inside the building.  We have no idea if this is a true story, but it is entertaining nonetheless.

We crossed from the Atlantic to Biscayne Bay through the Biscayne channel south of the island.  This passage is also called the Stiltsville channel because of the fishing shacks built along its sides.  Some of these are shown below.

We anchored this evening in a spot called Biscayne Bight, which is right in front of the Florida White House.  While he was in office President Nixon liked to come to this house, and used it frequently.  I didn’t manage to get a photo of it, but I did get a decent shot of downtown Miami across the bay.  It can be an impressive view at night.

After dark a severe thunderstorm came up.  During the storm a sailboat dragged it’s anchor from about 600 feet away.  They were broadside to the wind, and nearly T-boned the bow of our friend’s boat that was just in front of us, with the sailboat’s anchor dislodging our friend’s anchor.  The sailboat then missed us by about 5 feet, and when their anchor caught in the mud they were about 30 feet behind us.  I had to use the engines to stay away from them until the storm passed, and we were then able to move to a different spot.  It wasn’t a fun evening.  To make matters worse I had an argument with the woman on the sailboat over the radio who claimed we were dragging into them.  I had to point out that we weren’t dragging our anchor upwind, nor were the houses a couple hundred feet behind her moving upwind either.

Tomorrow we will continue on to Dania Beach where we will have some work done on the boat.