Keyitis
30 May 2014
Wiley
We got to Key Largo four days before the “kids” – Sean and Tesia. They would be down for a week. We would spend a week SCUBA diving there and then leave to head north to Lake Worth, Palm Beach; from there we would cross to the Bahamas for the third time. A couple months cruising the Abacos, and then back across, and head for home. This was the plan and a highly workable plan it was.
Years ago – back in the early 70s – noted author and SCUBA diver Bill Barada wrote an article in Skin Diver Magazine called “Keyitis”. Mr. Barada living in the Florida Keys at the time, defined “Keyitis” as a condition caused by staying in the Florida Keys, which has as its chief symptoms an entire los of personal ambition, coupled with an almost bovine contentment with one’s lot in life, and an enhanced ability to enjoy each day as it comes. I believed that we were immune. Just as cockroaches cannot survive in Chicago winter, our climate seems to make people of Chicago-land “strivers” – never content with how things are, or what they are, but always wanting and working toward – MORE! Chicago has been called “ the city on the make” a place noted for ambition and “hustle”. Chicagoans who spend much time in Florida gain the impression that natives of Florida could not live in the Chicago area, because most, like the cockroach, could not survive a Chicago winter, and the rest could not survive the frantic pace and competition, and would quickly be “Killed and eaten”!
Fate took a hand, and forever killed my delusion that we were immune from “Keyitis”. Merry’s knee got worse and worse to the point where not only could she no longer run, but walking any distance caused great discomfort. This is a big problem, since living on the boat – with no car- requires that we walk everywhere. Merry came back from one walk to the Publix grocery store – a four-mile round trip – limping badly. I urged her to fly home and see a doctor. On top of this, our son Brad – a martial arts expert – broke a bone in his hand, which required surgery. He made me promise that his mother would not come home for the surgery – a hard promise to keep. I called my brother Keith, - if you look up the term “nice guy” in the dictionary his picture is there – who volunteered to take Brad to his surgery, stay with him, drive him home, and stay afterwards. With his own grit and his Uncle Keith’s help Brad made it through the surgery just fine. However, in view of all the circumstances, Merry decided to fly home for a few weeks so that she could see a doctor about her knee and help Brad recover from his surgery.
Merry left me alone on the boat at Marina Del Mar. She made me promise that I would not take the boat out by myself to go diving. So, I was stuck. A kind of total inertia set in. Each day began with the free continental breakfast on the patio, a mere thirty feet from Les Miserables. It then took a long time to read the Chicago Tribune (on kindle) and long conversations with other sailors. There is no beach on Key Largo, but I found a place I could walk to and climb down into the water, so some days I went for a swim in the ocean. Marina Del Mar has three pools, so some days I swam laps. Lunch and a beer at Sharkey’s became routine. Once in a while, I would go for a run. Watching the dive boats go in and out and going diving a couple times myself with a friend, off his boat. Meaning to work on minor repairs on maintenance the boat needed, but just never seeming to get done. Getting to know Jackie Luna, the new (temporary) assistant dock master and her fiancé’ Z, who works on a diving charter boat. Going to dive shops and picking out a new Scubpro BC for Merry – Watching the African Queen (the actual boat they used to make the movie) go up and down the canal every day, taking tourists out. Meaning to get some writing done on my latest play, but never writing anything. Accomplishing nothing, day after day, and not feeling guilty about it, as happy and content as a walrus laying in the sun – and increasingly bearing more than a small physical resemblance to said walrus.
So when Merry got back, she found a changed man. A man, with the newly acquired insight that going aground is really not a problem at all if you merely decide to stay forever exactly where you are stuck. The Bahamas no long beckoned. Why move? All the hassle – all that sailing, when we can simply stay here at marina Del Mar, go for little sails to and from the reef, and go scuba diving every day.
But Merry came back full of Chicago hustle. She has been hired to create four new courses for the doctoral program in Leadership in Adult Learning and Education at Aurora University. She is teaching a course at AU in June! She is teaching two of the new courses she is creating, during the fall term 2014! She has to get ready! We need to provision the boat for our voyage to the Bahamas! Activity! Work! Accomplish! Strive!
So we went to lunch at Sharkey’s sitting at a table in the sun, watching the boats go in and out of the canal. Fish sandwiches. A couple of glasses of wine- earnest discussions. We had learned that our youngest son Sean, a detective with the Arlington Heights Police Department, would be receiving the annual Crime-stopper Award at a luncheon held in his honor in May, the same week that his wife, our lovely daughter-in-law Tesia, was graduating from Northern Illinois University with her nursing BA degree. The mayor, Chief of Police, Sean’s commander and Sean himself would all be giving speeches. Obviously, we had to fly home for these landmark events, and it would be a lot easier to do this if we were in the Keys, than in the Bahamas. The Bahamas had raised the cost of a cruising permit for a 30-foot boat from $150 (for 90 days) to $300. By the bottom of the second glass of wine, we determined that we would stay at Marina Del Mar.
Inertia is truly the greatest force in the universe. In the Keys, inertia is amplified to the 10th power.
Keyitis
Life was good. We took Les Miserables out to the reef for SCUBA diving twenty-nine times. We usually did two dives each time. We frequently dove at Molasses Reef, which was closest to Key Largo Canal and Marina Del Mar, but we also dove at French Reef, Grecian Rocks, and Dry Rocks (where the statue of Christ of the Abyss is). The water was warm and clear, and we had a lot of fun.
Our diving had one troubling aspect. A lot of the coral is dead. Grecian Rocks was probably the worst. Over much of the reef you see dead coral covered by green algae. Most of the Staghorn coral is dead. You would also see a lot of dead brain coral. It takes fifty years for brain coral to grow to the size of a basketball. They big ones are a thousand years old. We have been diving in the Keys since the 1970s and the destruction of the coral over time is depressing. A study showed that there has been a 44% decline in coral in the keys just since 1996. The coral is being killed by sewage treatment, overdevelopment, run-off from fertilizers, and herbicides used on lawns and golf courses, and dredging. It has been estimated that if the things that are killing the coral were to come to a complete stop, the reef would recover in ONLY THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS.
The scuba diving community in Florida has made a valiant effort to protect the reefs. They have done a great job hunting and killing lionfish in the Pennekamp Coral Reef Park – we saw them on almost every dive in the Bahamas, and only two times during our entire time at key Largo. (The Lionfish is an invasive species from the Pacific, which has had a devastating impact on the Atlantic coast and the Caribbean). Dive shops and dive boats in Key Largo have done a good job educating divers about not touching coral, as evidence by the fact that we hardly ever saw soft coral that had been broken off. There is also a modest effort to “farm” Staghorn coral, and divers take the coral to the reefs and plant it. It’s obvious that this effort pales to insignificance compared to the scale of destruction, which the people of the state of Florida have inflicted upon the only coral reef in the U.S.
The Governor of Florida (who was just re-elected) is a right-wing Republican, as are a majority of both houses of the state legislature. Republicans do not care about the environment. Absent some strong Federal intervention – which is unlikely, since Republicans control Congress – America’s only coral reef is doomed.
Yet for now, the diving in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park is still a lot of fun. Visibility underwater is not as good as in the Bahamas – 30-50 feet, as opposed to 80-100 feet. Sharks have been a protected species in the Bahamas for more than thirty years, so you see a lot of them when diving – nurse, blacktip, and big bull sharks. In the Keys, we only saw a few nurse sharks with the exception of one blacktip Wiley saw with Sean. Of course sharks are not a protected species in Florida. We saw some big groupers in the Keys, but there were not tame like the ones we saw in the Bahamas. On the other hand we saw a lot more of the colorful small reef fish in the keys. This may be a function of the good job local divers have done, controlling the Lionfish population.
One day morphed into the next. We ate at great restaurants – including the Pilot House, which is built over the water, with “windows” in the floor so that you can watch the fish swim by as you dine. Twice we drove a rental car to Key West, where we toured Earnest Hemingway’s house, had a beer and burger in his honor at famous “Sloppy Joe’s Bar”, one of his old haunts. We also took a tour of the USCG Ingham, a big Treasury class coast guard cutter that played an important role in the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. We found a terrific restaurant with great food, Blue Moon, where you eat outside, and roosters, hens and chickens wander around underneath the tables and around your feet. (No chicken dinner that night!)
Back at Key Largo, we swam in the beautiful pool at Marina Del Mar, and Merry worked on her school work. We made friends with Brian, the dock master and a professional caliber diver, Boxley, a “50 something” server at Sharkey’s who seems to have been everywhere and done everything, including writing songs some of which he played and sang for us, Jackie and “Z her fiancé – a wonderful smart young couple who live in Tavernier but work on Key Largo. Of course, we also made many short term friendships with other sailors as they came, stayed a while, and then left. I was thrilled to meet Captain Frank Pappy, who wrote the Cruising guide to the Florida Keys, which I used to read on cold winter nights in Illinois dreaming of day sailing in the keys.
Absent the misfortune of some terrible personal tragedy, a person would have to work really hard to be unhappy in the Keys, and I didn’t work hard at anything.