Now it's REALLY silent!
23 February 2011 | Little Shark River, FL
Today we left the keys. We hauled up our anchor at sunrise, followed the channel back out to the Gulf of Mexico and headed for the Florida mainland.
Of course, its not all that dramatic a jump: it was only about thirty miles, but what a change! The first hint that we weren't in the keys anymore was fog...yes, real, honest-to-gosh, thick-as-soup fog. Of course, being a good Nova Scotia boat, we're somewhat familiar with fog and the radar came on, the fog signal started blaring, the lights came on, we doubled the watch, and carried on. It was a fairly extensive fog bank but, after an hour or so, we came out of the other side into a strange world where the sea was absolutely flat and the same color as the sky so that there was no visible transition: crab pot floats seemed to float in the aquamarine void that we were suspended in...very beautiful and surreal.
The other hint that we had left the keys and were heading into a less populous part of the world was the loss of all cellular signals. Even with our amplified, external antenna, the call I was on got patchy and then dropped altogether. I was hoping we would reconnect when we got in close to shore but no joy: We're on the southwest edge of the Everglades and it really is wilderness. So, for the first time on our voyage, we had an internet-free night, which was nice in some ways but not particularly well-timed!
Another not-in-the-keys-anymore experience was finding a good shelling beach. The keys are surrounded by reefs and shoals, so not many shells wash onto their beaches. The good beaches for collecting shells are the ones on the west coast of Florida and, sure enough, we made our landfall at east Cape Sable and anchored for a couple of hours so Anne and Leslie could dingy to the beach where they found it littered with great shells.
Given the total lack of cell coverage here, I'm not expecting we'll get back into range until late tomorrow when we approach the northern edge of the Everglades. Until then, we'll have to make do with the beauty of our surroundings and the pleasure of each other's company...Oh, the sacrifices!