Fun in the Sun
05 February 2011 | Marathon, FL
Anne
After the cruiser's net this morning, we packed up a picnic lunch, took our hand-held GPS, hand-held VHF, and various other items and dinghied through Sister's Creek to Sombrero Beach on the Atlantic side of Boot Key. It's a nice enough beach, but the tide line is littered with Portuguese Man-of-Wars. We have read that these jelly-fish relatives can sting even after the tentacle have deteriorated in the sand, so we wore our footwear even on the beach.
There is a very nice park by the beach equipped with restrooms and showers (well - outdoor, cold water showers - but you could rinse off some). It has a very nice playground with several pieces of equipment that are unusual. Evelyn and Leslie dubbed the swings in the picture the McDonald swings or the hover crafts. There was a sort of merry-go-round but it was a conical rope structure with two platforms. Also a thing that looked sort of like a big spider constructed of the same blue rope with a small somewhat bouncy platform in the middle.
We found two geocaches while there. The hand-held GPS became useless when the batteries died, but fortunately, the hand-held VHF also has a built in GPS. Coordinates only, but enough to find the caches.
If you have Google Earth and want to locate the beach, it is at 24 41'30N, 81 05'10W. Many pictures of this pretty spot to view there.