Captain Slate

The Fury refunded some of what they charged because of the weather. The jet ski was a hoot, and we headed back to Marathon to check into the Banana Bay Resort.

Lodging in the Keys is pricy. Rooms in Key West start at $300. A night. We lucked out with the White Sands and the Banana was looking like our kind of place until I read the trip advisor ratings. 

" This place must have been killer when Sean Connery was James Bond. It appears not to have been updated since then. The rooms were very dated, beds uncomfortable, tennis courts overgrown, and it was still expensive at $135 a night,”

 

Actually our room wasn’t bad. A little used, the pizza box in the refrigerator a bit disgusting. But up to our standards, not as bad as the reviews, and  not as bad as later in the trip.

Another early morning involving an  alarm again woke us up. We had to get up to Key Largo and meet up with Captain  Slate, for a scuba adventure.

The Captain has a little dive shack out  at the end of the road. He wasn’t there but of couple of his mates were.

 

The mates sized us up and started to print out waivers,  and all kind of forms that we had to read, sign and remember what they said. Since one of the forms asked “have you had any vomiting...no wait that was the cruise ship. The Capt. Wanted to know if you have had a cold or any coughing. I did, so I couldn’t do scuba. I was washed out even before I met the Capitan. Peppermint fared better and made it all the way to the pool at the motel down the lane, before she was scrubbed from scuba too.

The mates said we could come back and go out and snorkel with the boat in the afternoon.

After lunch we went back to Slate's boat, and waited for our fellow passengers and captain
.

The captain finally arrived at his boat, and  welcomed us all aboard, put in his good glass eye, the one with the cataract and off to sea we went. Slate never followed a direct course, he sorta wandered from port to starboard, and back. He either had a lot of play in his rudder or just let the boat find the reef, and find the reef we did.

Unlike our first snorkel experience, today the water was flat. Slate took us out to a protected  reef that was just alive with fish, and coral. The water was warm. snorkeling in the Keys is great.

 

Two of our fellow passengers were patched out as divers and looked very cool swimming below us. Thanks for the photo Peppermint. And thanks Capt. Slate for a great day.