The Final Frontier
Naval Air Station Key West on Boca Chica is a lovely place to park a boat but without a car it is lacking convenience. There is almost nothing else on the base besides the marina and the fighter jets that fly here. The other services like the shopping and groceries are on another island. All that is to say, this isn't a permanent home base for me; this also was not my turnaround point. I appreciate isolated places in nature and when I learned about the Dry Torgugas National Park, I was hooked. It's another sixty nautical miles west of Boca Chica and is home to the Civil War era, Fort Jefferson, an outpost, the final frontier of the Florida Keys. So, on Friday, after three nights at Boca Chica, making friends, doing laundery and a grocery shopping trip (someone was nice enough to give me a ride), I set sail again. Sixty miles is a long stretch to fit in during daylight hours so I decided to make an intermediate stop at the ,uninhabited, Marquesas Keys where I co...