Indian and Rodriguez Keys

After Boot Key Harbor, we continued working our way northeastward up the Florida Keys. Our first stop was Indian Key. NOTE: If you’re using the Skipper Bob cruising guide for choosing anchorages, please note that there is NOT eight feet of water at the mooring buoys here. At the westernmost buoy (farthest from the island), there is about seven feet max at high tide, and about six feet at low tide (at least, the tides that we saw); the water is shallower than that at the other two buoys. However, the night sky was gorgeous here, and the Milky Way was clearly visible.

We spent two nights at Rodriguez Key, near Key Largo. We intended to dinghy over to John Pennekamp park, but it would have been about a four-miles ride and squalls kept rolling through, so it was an inside/outside kind of day instead. The island provides good protection from the south and southwest, though, and holding was pretty good, although in grass (NOT on the hardpan). Rodriguez Key is pretty neat—all mangroves—and it looks like nothing else on the island. In fact, you can’t even see the island land for all the mangroves along the shore. Chris mentioned that this is probably what all the keys looked like before development came along. If we looked west from our place in the anchorage, development was all we saw, so we tended to look east. The weather was squally, so we were up and down all night (see previous blog on sleep).