Key West and the Marquesas Islands

5/5/22

We arrived in Key West on a perfectly clear blue day and picked up a ball in the city mooring field.

We checked in and got our gates keys for the dinghy dock and settled in for the week ahead. Before leaving Tampa, we bought 2 new beach cruises and a bike trailer for the doggies to go in as we knew it was quite a trek to the dog park, town and the beach.

We had never used, or tried to even put Cali and Mr Pete in one before but they loved it immediately so our transport was just perfect. We love cycling everywhere on the island, looking at all the beautiful homes as well as getting some exercise in, to and from the stores, lunches, bars and so on.

As always we love our time here. We had dinners at all our favorite places, sunset cocktail hours all over the island and on board as well

Days just seems to blend together in Key West and before you know it a new week arrives. We were so busy here too because its quite far to the dock from the anchorage. So taking the dogs to go potty 3 or 4 times day is a full time job. We also had to do a food restock at Publix, get mail from the UPS and send off mail for our business too

On our last day before leaving Key West for the Tortugas, we saw that we had picked up a rat when we found our bananas eaten from the fruit bowl! Oh my goodness…to try and rid ourselves of this hitchhiker was something else! Now we had to go to the hardware store and stock up on rat traps. Apparently rats are good swimmers and even enjoy it! Who knew? But of course this freaked us out and gave us the hibby jibby’s. I mean, there are a gazillion places for it to hide inside the hull of the boat. Every night we kept the dogs in our room and set traps all over the boat to catch this clever stowaway. We made sure to keep all our fruit and open food away until we could catch it

On Friday the 13th the refueled at Sunset Marina and made the 4 hour trip to the Marquesas Island, stowaway included, for our overnight stop in the middle of nowhere at these beautiful islands. The water is so clean, clear and a beautiful green blue turquoise that we could see the bottom the whole way there. It’s so weird to be able to see your anchor on the bottom like that.

We had a magnificent bath with an incredible sunset there and left at 8am the next morning for our anchorage at the fort in the Tortugas