Anchored at 24°37.5312′N, 82°52.3086′W.

Birding

The bird situation is a wow. The noise is remarkable. It's a lot of birds out here in the middle of the ocean. If you're migrating from South America or southern Central America to North America, this is on your way. Stop off. Grab a couple of fish. Maybe rest for a day or two, and then move on.

Birds know routes over utterly trackless ocean. We use compass and careful monitoring of speed. Or a sextant and a clock. Or satellite-based GPS systems to find this place.

The main Garden Key area -- where Fort Jefferson is -- and the adjacent Bush Key have birds that are unique to this location: some terns and noddies. There are bunches and bunches of non-unique birds. Barn Swallows, for instance, seem to be willing to fly the whole way from Florida out here to nest in the fort.

A few miles away is Loggerhead Key with additional bird populations, and mooring balls for day visitors. No overnighting. There are some other places that have remarkably good SCUBA. We are not availing ourselves of all of the features.

CA captured almost 400 pictures. She's got a lot of sorting and filtering to pare them down the good pictures. And the personal life-list bird sightings.

Tiara

Ran into the folks from Tiara again today. We talked about body mechanics and getting the dighy started. And Florida. And Oneonta, NY. An odd thing to meet folks from this part of Florida (originally from Jamaica) with a kid that went to college in Oneonta, NY.

It's often awkward to explain that we're more-or-less homeless. We have the boat. But. We don't (currently) have a "home port". This is not the easiest thing to get a grip on. We liked the folks from Tiara because they saw it the way we see it: being homeless by choice can lead to funny/awkward situations because most levels of government make a fixed residence a requirement for the benefits of citizenship.

They invited us over to their boat for drinks. We were -- at the end of the day -- too disgusting to take our salty bodies over to their boat. We really want to spend time with them: they're lovely people. We were too covered in salt, sweat, and beach sand to impose ourselves on others.

We now have their boat card, however.

They're from the Florida's West Coast. When we get up to Port Charlotte, we're totally looking them up and seeing if we can talk our way into their boat at their marina for that drink.

Departure

We don't have a detailed weather forecast. We haven't sent anyone a float plan. We do have WX channel 03, which says seas 3' and winds out of the SSE at 10-15 knots. It's at the edge of being sporty, but, it's only 18 hours to Marco Island.

George from Indefatigable warned us to avoid any winds from the W or N.

Other than that, we're going by what we catch on the WX channel of the radio.