Key West FL USA

The inner harbour at Key West, looking across to the Municipal Harbourmaster’s office (grey building in centre) with extensive dinghy docks in front

Our first job, after arriving at Key West on the morning of Tuesday 12 March, was to dinghy ashore from the anchorage and visit the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) office to check in to the USA.  Not being au fait with the place, we tied up at what looked to be a dinghy dock at one of the private marinas.  When we found the office, the dockstaff told us that we should be at the municipal dock but were happy to let us stay where we were whilst we dealt with officialdom.  Unfortunately for them, dealing with the officialdom turned into a rather tedious process.  When she had called the CBP ‘Sector’ telephone number as we arrived at Key West, Nicky had been told that we should report to the CBP office on arriving at the town. Slightly wary about just making our way there (normal procedure is to pass full details of the boat registration and crewmembers’ passports before being permitted ashore) we used the landline in the marina office to call the town’s CBP office to pass that information. Our caution was justified and we were told in no uncertain terms that we should not arrive at the office until we had used CBP’s ROAM app to notify them of our arrival after which we would receive permission to set foot on land and visit the CBP office.  But we were on land and we didn’t have internet access.  “No problem”, came the reply.  “The marina is required by law to provide you with internet access to use the app”. Apparently, this applies even though we weren’t staying at the marina!  Just as well we have an appropriately modern smartphone onto which we could download the app (our iPad is far too old for the app to load onto it) and that we had also brought ashore our laptops and UK phones (happily, the latter had a signal) so that we could go through the multi-step security process before starting to use the app.  When, eventually, we had received a message to say that we were permitted ashore and must report to CBP within the next 24hrs, we headed off straight away. However, the CBP office in Key West is in the courthouse building and, as we found out when we arrived, electronic item (mobile phones, iPads, cameras, laptops) are not permitted inside!  So Nicky went in first to sort out BV’s new cruising licence and her 6-month entry stamp whilst I stayed outside with all the electronics and then we swapped places.  What a palaver.  To add insult to injury, the CBP officers in Key West, in contrast to all the other CBP officers we have spoken to, insisted that there is no problem with rescinding a cruising licence anywhere in the country as and when you want to, which was not at all our experience with our last cruising licence, and so would only issue us a cruising licence for one year rather than one valid to mid-Jan 2020 which is what we had wanted.  Hopefully, that will work for us for next winter as we expect to still be outside the USA in mid-March.  If not, we should be far enough south that we could just depart to the Bahamas for 15 days, though with the Bahamas charging a US$300 entry fee, that’d be an expensive way of doing things. [Ed:  the issue here is that if your vessel is inside US waters when the active cruising licence expires, you are required to remove her from US waters for 15 days before re-entering and obtaining a new cruising licence.  In our experience in 2018/9, rescinding a cruising licence before its expiry date can be virtually impossible.  Indeed, we had to return to Culebra in Puerto Rico in Jan 2019 in order to rescind the cruising licence that we obtained on 1 May 2018 just so as to avoid the 15-day thing as we knew we were likely to be back in the USA by 1 May 19.].

When we left BV, Serene, who had arrived just ahead of us, was anchored a good distance off to our southeast.  When we returned, she was close north of us, and spinning like a top

When, eventually, we had finished all the CBP paperwork, had our photos and fingerprints taken etc, etc we headed back to the dinghy via a laundry and the municipal dock, just to check them both out and confirm costs.  Back at BV we were somewhat disconcerted to find that Serene, a yacht that had arrived minutes before us, seemed to have moved (we wondered if the anchor had dragged) from her position when we had left BV well clear to the southwest of us to a new position remarkably close behind us to the north.  With the tide on the turn and the wind acting in opposition all the boats were spinning like tops and Serene (unoccupied at the time) was uncomfortably close to us and another yacht.  We watched her closely for a while and I even dinghied over to the other yacht to see if the owner knew how/when Serene had ended up in her current location but he hadn’t seen her arrive.  Eventually part of Serene’s crew returned and I helped them to re-anchor miles away [Ed: quite literally – on the other side of the main channel – but it’s where the owner wanted to be!!].

Top: Key West harbour and boardwalk.  Bottom: Colonial style houses abound in the residential areas
around the centre of the town

We took the dinghy ashore again, this time to the municipal dock (approx $7 per day to park the dinghy there) and went for a wander through the town.  We found West Marine and bought some bits for jobs the next day, including some powerful diesel bug treatment to treat any bugs left in the fuel tanks, and then enjoyed the sights of old town Key West.  There are lots of colonial style buildings here, many actually dating back to colonial times and to an era before air conditioning when large, shady verandas were essential to keep the homes cool.

The white building, known as The Red Doors, is now a clothing boutique but has had a varied and at times insalubrious history.  Built in late 1868 as a property speculation, it was first leased as a cigar factory to Cubans fleeing Havana.  When the cigar industry moved to Miami at the beginning of the 20^thcentury, the building became a ship chandlery and then, in the Depression, a grocery and hardware store.  By the 1950s shrimping was the new king of commerce in Key West and the building became a dockyard bar under a succession of owners, and was known informally as ‘The Bucket of Blood’ because of the dangerous reputation of the place.  The bar became economically unviable with the decline of the shrimping industry and closed in 1972.

Close to the harbour and the new boardwalk are many buildings dating from a time when Key West was a bustling commercial port as well as a big fishing centre.  Now the warehouses, stores and taverns have been converted to classy boutiques, cheeky by jowl with tourist tat shops.

Schooner Wharf Bar – a vibrant watering hole right on the harbour boardwalk with
reasonable wifi and good food

½ dozen oysters to keep you going?  Well, why not?

Over the next 2 days we did a number of jobs, interspersed with sightseeing in the town. Some of the jobs (updating the computers and electronic charts and catching up with home admin) we had to combine with visiting a boardwalk bar, the Schooner Wharf Bar, which we found had reasonable wifi, good beer and tasty food.  A terrible hardship!  All joking aside, our 2 months in the Turks and Caicos and Cuba with very little internet access had left us with electronics virtually screaming to be plugged into the web and left to update themselves for hours.  Happily, the bar staff seemed quite used to grotty yachties doing that and just kept bringing more beer!

Schooner Wharf Bar. Unfortunately, the steel drum performance was nothing to write home about

In terms of boat jobs, Nicky dealt with a small mountain of laundry, I trudged the propane cylinders to a local garage to have them refilled (using the filling station for LPG cars!) and together we tackled fitting and running the cables for a new GPS aerial as well as rewiring our wind instrument.  The old GPS aerial was probably working OK but it now didn’t seem to always communicate properly with the other instruments (notably the chart plotters, which is a just fraction critical) as well as it had done before we fitted a new multiplexer in November. We have a mixture of NMEA0183, NMEA2000 and Raymarine SeaTalk 1 networks on BV and the multiplexer shouldenable them all to talk to each other seamlessly.

All the time since we had last been in the US, the GPS readouts on some of the instrument displays had randomly blanked out and then, later, come back.  As for getting the COG and SOG to read correctly (and the same!) on all the various instruments, well, that had been a several week frustrating exercise in computer programming!  By hooking up the boat laptop to the new multiplexer I had been partially successful in reprogramming the multiplexer translations but I suspected that the issue was that the old GPS aerial was communicating in a very old version of the NMEA0183 and our old, now unsupported, Raymarine instruments probably don’t have the latest firmware in them.  The new GPS aerial works in NMEA2000 and seems to work much better with our set-up, though it’s still not 100% perfect.  (As an aside, it hadn’t helped that just as we had fitted the new multiplexer, there had been a date rollover issue with GPS chips and our plotters had needed a firmware update.  At the time we had thought that it was our new multiplexer causing the problem but an email to the manufacturer had highlighted that it wasn’t but that they had been caught by surprise and needed a few weeks to write a software patch to fix the issue.)  Whilst we were in the process of running wiring and playing with circuitry, we also rerouted some wiring for the wind instrument to simplify the Seatalk network and to try to help reduce the data dropouts.

Chickens roam the streets of Key West.  In the tourist office list of ‘must do’ things in Key West, getting a picture of a free-ranging chicken is up there with visiting the Southernmost Point

The other big boat job was reprovisioning and what a joy that was here in the land where the consumer is king compared with our recent time in Cuba!  Unfortunately, the nearest big supermarket is quite some way from the municipal dinghy dock – a $12 taxi ride distance away – but the range and the quality and the fact that it is all there under one roof was a delight!! For a while we felt as if we were in heaven – and the cashier must have thought all her birthdays had come at once as it turns out that Key West is not a cheap place to reprovision on account of it being at the very end of the highway.  Nevertheless, it was an excellent place for us to stock up before heading to the Bahamas where provisions can be very expensive.

With the chicken pictures in the bag, we had to visit the southern tip (and I got a picture of the lighthouse too)

And with all the jobs done we treated ourselves to a little more sightseeing:  the Southernmost Point in the continental USA…..

Key West is famous as the one-time home of Ernest Hemingway.  This was his house

….Ernest Hemingway’s old home, though we didn’t go inside because it was about to close,…..

The town is also famous for being the start (Mile 0) of Highway 1…..

…..Mile 0 on Highway 1……

….and has a reputation as being a tolerant place as well as a lively place

….and most of the rest of the town as well.

More delightful colonial buildings; shame about the ugly electricity cables 

Duval Street, Key West’s main street and a lively hub as sunset approaches

We could easily have stayed longer, much longer, but we were very conscious that we needed to be in Nassau on 25 March to meet our friends Nici and Neil who would be joining us on board for 10 days.  By the shortest possible route, Nassau is about 300nm from Key West, in a generally easterly direction, so hard on the wind or into wind.  With about 10 days to go before we had to be in Nassau we really needed to be looking to make tracks, particularly when the forecasters started talking about cold fronts once more.

The harbour by night

So we put our vague plans of SCUBA diving on the Florida Keys on hold and instead decided on an overnight passage to Bimini, departing on Friday 15 March.  Once we were in the Bahamas we would be able to slow down again a little and work our way to Nassau in and around the weather fronts.

Key West, Florida, USA