Marathon, Boot Key Harbor

 Hello!

Update:

We remain in Boot Key Harbor Marathon, at the City Marina on a mooring ball. We have been exploring the area by dinghy and occasionally Uber, plus doing chores. Laundry and grocery shopping take a lot longer from a boat. The harbor has hundreds of boats but is fairly quiet. There is no car traffic noise here, just an occasional generator and always dinghies going back and forth. We have tried several restaurants and liked them all, Dockside, Keys Fisheries and Keys Steak and Lobster. We like to end each day in the cockpit with one of our boat drinks and watch the evening come in before fixing dinner. We plan to sail to the Bahamas next week. 

 Marathon stories:

Boaters here are extremely helpful. We came into the mooring field and promptly ran aground in an area marked by an informational buoy as “shallow.”  Go figure! But the writing on the buoy was very faint. A man in a nearby boat started gesturing wildly in the direction we needed to go. Al got us off the shallow area and we headed to our assigned ball. Meanwhile the woman from the boat with the gesturing man got in their dinghy and started off in a direction. It took us a few minutes to realize she was helping us. She picked up part of the mooring ball, I snagged it with a boat hook, and we strung a thick line through it to attach to the ball So nice! Another man helped us find the way into the marina office. Again, with some wild gesturing as we were headed towards the shallows in our dinghy. On the second day here, we put our dinghy in the water, started the engine, put it in gear and immediately wrapped one of our lines around the propeller. A massive catamaran was motoring towards us. The woman on the front of the boat kept saying over and over “Our brakes went out.” I had a couple of choice words for her, but I managed to hold them in. Al started paddling the dinghy so we would not be run over by the catamaran. Luckily the man at the helm noticed us and slowed down to avoid us. Seconds later our next-door neighbor came out on his deck to ask if we needed help. I thanked him and said we were out of practice. He replied that he and his wife had been cruising for only a year and had wrapped their dinghy prop 8 or 10 times. So nice!

 Info and Questions:

Are you missing your friends from home? Yes, the hard thing about travel is leaving your buddies at home. We like to make “Happy Hour Calls” to our friends and family while watching the sunset. Hopefully some will be able to join us on this trip. We have met a few folks here, in the marina laundry room or the mail and gathering area. We met some locals at the Dockside Restaurant. People here seem very friendly and down-to-earth. One way to communicate in an anchorage is to put up a flag that signifies something about yourself. A boat in the harbor Horizon had a Seven Seas Cruising Association Commodore flag up. We are also Commodores in that club, so we dinghied up and said hello. They circumnavigated the world in 8 years and now spend their winters here and summers traveling in a campervan around the US. We had a nice chat, one interesting thing the woman said was “I always tell people, if you don’t like working on your boat, don’t get a boat.” So true!

How did you prepare for this trip?

It’s hard to know when to say we began preparations for this trip. In the 80s Al built a 31’ wooden cruising sailboat, Christine, and he has been making overnight trips on sailboats for decades. When we met in 1998, we started taking trips on that 31-foot boat up and down the west coast of Florida as far as Key West and Cuba. So, you could say we started preparations way back then! To get specific about this trip, in the last few years we have steadily upgraded our current boat Jade with a new engine, new sails, updated electrical system, new dinghy, new navigational systems plus the decks, hull and bottom have been painted. We wrote out a boat project list in the beginning of 2025 to get focused. We worked on project after project all year, interspersed with normal life! When that list was complete, we started another list. Usually, several items are being worked on at the same time, and we try to finish a task completely before crossing it off the list. In mid-February 2026 we moved on to the boat.  That helped us finish the final projects and put a pause on most of normal life! In the last two weeks we had a meeting every night covering what we did that day and what needed to be done the next day. Those last two months were busy and tiring but it got us off the dock on April 15^th.  

Let me know if you have any specific questions.

Thank you for reading!

 Love and Peace,

Fran Lima