Florida Keys

Welcome to Sunny Florida

As you can see we started the trip off right...a stone crab and key lime pie picnic on a beach.  Always a good way to start a trip!

Here we are heading to Dry Tortugas by seaplane.  This part was very cool - though I was a little perturbed to discover the plane was actually built in the 50's...luckily that wasn't pointed out to me until we were on our way back.

This is Dry Tortugas

On the left hand side of the photo - which is nearly cut off - you can see a little building.  That is where the ferry docks.  The plane actually parks in the water on the left side of the picture in that splodge of water you see.  The piece of land coming towards us on the left side is actually a bird sanctuary and you can't walk there - not that you'd want to as you'd probably be attacked by hundreds of birds...  On the right you can see a piece of land sticking out with some black dots in front of it.  The dots are what is leftover of an old dock - there is a another similar structure on the left out of photo range.  These, ideally, are the best places to see fish but when we went the water was a bit rough and the visibility wasn't great.  Here is another view of the dock ruins.

Of course no trip would be complete without a cannon shot - so here we are!

This thing was massive, deadly and never fired (well never fired in battle anyway).
If you want to read more about the fort this link is pretty good and has lots of pictures:
http://www.shannontech.com/ParkVision/DryTortugas/DryTortugas2.html

We really came here to snorkel and to be honest we were disappointed.  The seas were not exactly what you would call rough but with snorkeling no wind is best and the waters were a bit mucky.  The sea is really shallow which I thought would be great, but it turns out big fish don't like shallow water!  Go figure?  So the best place to see anything big is to swim as far as you can from the beach and hit deep water.  We didn't want to do that so didn't see anything big.

The best places to go were along the sea wall, that said you could see almost as much walking along the sea wall as swimming along the sea wall.  You can't swim in the lagoon but you can see how clear it is in the picture below.

Here is some of the wildlife we saw:

This is a female frigate bird - the males have this awesome red puffy chest (and we did see some but apparently we have no pictures so you'll just have to take my word for it).  These birds just hangout over the fort, I'm not sure why as I didn't see them fishing.

Brown Pelican.  Apparently these things have practically indestructible heads - which is good because when they dive they don't hold back.  Pretty cool to watch.

 These might be damsel fish - but don't quote me on that - you can see the seawall behind them.  The seawall is covered in coral and these guys just kind of hang out around here.  I guess there are no predators, we really didn't see anything bigger than a parrot fish in here.

These are parrot fish - and if you listen to the video you will hear clicking.  The parrot fish are causing that clicking as they chip the coral off the rocks.

Cuttle fish

I think this is a Tang

And of course you'll see lots of schools of little fish (some of the schools are massive and that is a really cool experience) and plenty of coral.

From the air - if you keep a keen eye - you can see some pretty cool stuff...of course with these pictures you might just need to take my word for it...

Shark!

Turtles

But enough about the wildlife...what else can you do in Key West?
Well you can fish - we didn't but there were people fishing off all the bridges on the way down - you can kayak...here we are going through the mangroves.

You can watch the sunset...

...with every other tourist in Key West

and you can eat!  Which, face it, is one of my all time favourite things to do.

When in Florida one must have Key Lime Pie!  The best we found was actually at a place called the Hot Tin Roof - http://www.oceankey.com/key-west-restaurant.aspx - but sorry no pic, it was so good I forgot to take one!  They did have some funky appetizers though - do it yourself BBQ!

That's all for the trip, it was very short, but stay tuned as the baby-moon is coming up!