There is no way for me to do justice to today's trip. I'm just too tired and too ready for sleep. So I'll post a few pictures, and maybe a video of a barracuda, then I'll decide later if I'll say or post more.
Briefly, we took a high-speed ferry the 68 miles from Key West to Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas, and back--five hours of traveling round trip. Between these sea voyages, we stayed in the Dry Tortugas National Park for four and a half hours.
The main cultural feature of the park is Fort Jefferson, a huge brick structure, supposedly constructed with about 16 million bricks and the largest brick structure in the Western Hemisphere. The fort, which takes up most of Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas reminded us of Fort Point, a fairly small fort set up in San Francisco to guard the bay. It now sits under the Golden Gate Bridge. These two forts must have both been constructed around the same time: the mid-1800s. Fort Jefferson became a prison during the Civil War and the famed Dr Mudd, who tended to Booth's wounds after the latter's assassination of Lincoln, was once a prisoner there. The structure is surrounded by a moat, once had a drawbridge, and is huge. Three stories tall, but surrounding a good amount of space.
Some of the brick of the fort is falling away, leaving me to wonder exactly what balance between preservation and destruction the Park Service is envisioning for this building.
I love the fort's moat, which is filled with seawater. For most of its extent, the moat wall separates the moat itself from nothing more than the sea.
From the top of the fort, there is a good view of Bush Key, which was overrun with thousands and thousands of nesting birds today. But the secret of Fort Jefferson is that the outer side of its moat wall supports the best reef around the Garden Key, and it is covered with all types of corals and teeming with other marine life.
Someone took a picture of our whole family at the gate leading into Fort Jefferson, allowing us one of the few pictures of the entire family on vacation.
What we really enjoyed was snorkeling. Our equipment didn't fit us perfectly (which really slowed down my swimming) and we drank a little too much seawater, but we saw some interesting sea life. We spent at least an hour and a half swimming in the water around Garden Key (circumsnorkeling the entire island except for the small part we had to walk across).
We had a digital underwater still and video camera that could hold over 1000 photographs at stunning resolution or about 30 minutes of video, so we have about 200 photographs of the park and its animal life. One of the most interesting finds was a giant lobster (I'd guess weighing at least fifteen pounds) that had set up house in a large gap in the moat wall of the fort. Since I was floating in the water as I took the picture and using the flash underwater for the first time, I didn't capture enough of the beast to give anyone a sense of its size. But it was large.
Erin and Nancy had barracuda resting by them, enjoying their company. But I decided to follow a barracuda, capturing my second pursuit as video.
After our snorkeling, we headed back to the boat, showered on board, then set off for what is passing for the mainland nowadays: Key West. Tim saw a sea turtle on this trip, but the rest of us missed it since we were inside at the time. Otherwise it was an unremarkable voyage, except that it was the end of today's great expedition. The park was as good as we had expected. We just wish we'd had more time there.
We ended the day having a good Cuban meal outdoors in an open courtyard at Mallory Square. Feral cats surrounded the space, but never ventured in. Roosters were everywhere, even walking at our feet, but as darkness fell they ended their day roosting in the trees around us. It was a great meal in a magical spot, but we thought little of it because we had been to the Dry Tortugas today.
Quote of the Day (Erin to Tim):
I'm not high-fiving you for melanoma.
volveremos a las tortugas
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