A week ago Friday, Mrs. Salmo and I departed for Florida, bound initially for Key West, a place I'd never been before. The Alaska airlines flight was a major screw up. I'm reasonable and don't mind putting up with delays due to weather or mechanical issues. Those things happen. But when they have everyone board the airplane, finally leave the gate, then make a couple laps around the North terminal, finally announcing that we are returning to the gate because the pilots have "timed out," so a new pilot crew needs to replace them. They announced that the replacement crew is at the gate and waiting for us. Once we're at the gate, they announce that everyone needs to deplane because the replacement crew really hasn't even arrived at the airport yet. The upshot: we finally depart 3 1/2 hours later than originally scheduled. Food vouchers to airport vendors and free drinks once we reboard are a nice - and necessary - touch, but not complete mitigation IMO. But that's it for now.
Our plan was to fly into Ft. Meyers, spend the night, and take the ferry, or water taxi, down to Key West. I'm glad we did, but I wouldn't do that again. Shortly after leaving Marcos Island there's nothing to see but open ocean (Florida Bay) all around until we approach the Dry Tortugas and then Key West. Key West is a small town totally driven by tourism, and pretty damn expensive. I'm pretty sure the flavor has changed a lot since Jimmy Buffet began his guitar picking career there.
My impressions: the CHICKENS! The damn feral chickens are everywhere! Two on the porch when we arrived at our B&B. They hang around the breakfast tables waiting for visitors to drop food scraps. They wander around the dining areas of the open air restaurants (which is most of them), and they hop on chairs and even tables when they're not occupied by customers. And those table tops don't get washed off every time before the next customers are seated there. Now I don't hate chickens. They have their place, like in a chicken coop. Not where I live and eat! So where did all these chickens come from? The story goes that the Cuban immigrants were very fond of cock fighting and kept a lot of birds for that purpose. Around 1970 or shortly thereafter, Key West banned cock fighting. So instead of killing and eating the birds, the Cubans simply released their birds, in retaliation for the ban apparently. And now they are everywhere on the small island. And according to one tour guide, you may be fined up to $500 for killing one of these chickens, which I was glad to learn because my automatic reaction to chickens that annoy me is to wring their necks. (I have a history of raising chickens and working at a chicken ranch when I was in high school.)
The weather was warm, like 80 degrees, so it was tee shirt, shorts, and flip flops weather. Duval Street is great for people watching and it reminds me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. So I noticed that the first 3 girls (females under 40 are girls to me) wearing cutoff jean were cut low enough, or was that high enough, that the bottoms of their butt cheeks were exposed. Three in a row! Was that a coincidence? Or is that a contemporary fashion statement that I wasn't up to speed on? Seems funny in hindsight considering that while we were having lunch at a beach side restaurant, the girls walking by in bikinis had 100% of their butt cheeks exposed. Drat! What can I say? Maybe I'm getting old, but when I was young, bikinis still left something to the imagination. Not so much now.
Lots of excellent restaurants and we ate a lot of local seafood. Conch ceviche, conch fritters, lobster mac n cheese, yellowtail snapper - which is the best fish species I tried, mahi mahi, and grouper. The best restaurants were in the $$$ group; I think we got a pizza one night (when we needed a reprieve from seafood) where the price was $$. And you find some of the best restaurants in unexpected places. Like Oceans 305 in an Islamorada RV park. Or Square Grouper in a boat yard. This was a high end restaurant with the parking lot surrounded by large storage racks of many dozens of boats, some of them pretty high end too, with those multiple large HP outboard engines. Ah, but we ate well.
This was supposed to be a fishing report, but as you can see from the thread title, it isn't. Oh, we had planned to fish and made arrangements with a guide out of Islamorada. It got a little breezy on Tuesday. The guide called and said the wind was forecast at 30 mph for Wednesday and Thursday, so all fishing trips were cancelled. There were still small craft warnings on Friday, although we saw some small boats wandering out of the canals in Cape Coral that day. So thanks to Hurricane Nicole I never strung up a rod on this trip. Even though Nicole mainly hit Florida north of Miami, there was enough wind down south to make boating and fishing impractical and impossible.
In Islamorada the closest we got to any fish was Robbie's Marina, where they feed tarpon and other fish that hang around the docks. We saw a few tarpon and nurse sharks north of 50 pounds cruising there. I glimpsed a couple of other fish zooming around there but wasn't able to identify them. It turns out that feeding the tarpon is sketchy (you can buy a bucket of bait fish for $4.50) because the damn pelicans that hang out on the dock will steal your bait fish. They are quite aggressive and will bite! I could learn to hate pelicans more than chickens lurking in restaurants. I was nearly tempted to string up a fly rod and try casting from the docks since the area was fairly well protected from the wind. But I think it's frowned upon if not prohibited. An interesting thing about the area and marinas in particular is the boats! There are thousands of boats. And not just a few flats skiffs powered by a single outboard motor. But scads of boats for heading out on the blue water, powered by two, three, and even four large outboards. It isn't the least bit uncommon to see boats with three or four 300 HP motors, and a few with four 400 HP outboards. I can't believe the number of boats we saw that would be priced as high as the value of my house. Simply amazing! There is a lot of money in south Florida.
We visited a friend and former co-worker in Cape Coral. There has been a lot of clean up since Hurricane Ian blew through, but the amount of damage is very extensive. My friend's boat got tipped with the bow down in the water on the boat lift, but was otherwise undamaged. He was extremely lucky. Across the canal was a boat sitting in someone's back yard that will need to be moved back into the water. Somehow. We saw boats that were listing, sunk, and even sitting in a median strip of an arterial street. At least that one is accessible to load on a trailer and move back wherever it's supposed to be. And it's troubling to see so many homes with roofs covered with blue tarps. FEMA puts numbers on some of the tarps, which we interpreted as a priority system for which ones the contractors should repair first and so on down the line. We saw how a lot of the newer homes are constructed with the yard built up a few feet where the house floor plan footprint is. Those are the ones that didn't get water inside. We met a guy at the airport whose house was not built those 3 or 4 feet higher. He got 2 feet of water in his house and 3 feet in the garage. So everything sitting on the floor was destroyed, along with the bottom 2 feet of the walls, baseboards, and moulding, sheetrock, and insulation, etc. A total mess, and he can't live in the house for who knows how long. It will be a year or two before a lot of the area is put back together. And some of it never will. Not everyone has flood and hurricane insurance. I think a lot of people were hit so hard economically that they just walked away from damaged and destroyed homes to start over somehow, as best they can.
I even took a few pictures. If I get them uploaded to my computer I might add some to this unfishing report. Of course there were no photos of fish this trip. Maybe another time.
Our plan was to fly into Ft. Meyers, spend the night, and take the ferry, or water taxi, down to Key West. I'm glad we did, but I wouldn't do that again. Shortly after leaving Marcos Island there's nothing to see but open ocean (Florida Bay) all around until we approach the Dry Tortugas and then Key West. Key West is a small town totally driven by tourism, and pretty damn expensive. I'm pretty sure the flavor has changed a lot since Jimmy Buffet began his guitar picking career there.
My impressions: the CHICKENS! The damn feral chickens are everywhere! Two on the porch when we arrived at our B&B. They hang around the breakfast tables waiting for visitors to drop food scraps. They wander around the dining areas of the open air restaurants (which is most of them), and they hop on chairs and even tables when they're not occupied by customers. And those table tops don't get washed off every time before the next customers are seated there. Now I don't hate chickens. They have their place, like in a chicken coop. Not where I live and eat! So where did all these chickens come from? The story goes that the Cuban immigrants were very fond of cock fighting and kept a lot of birds for that purpose. Around 1970 or shortly thereafter, Key West banned cock fighting. So instead of killing and eating the birds, the Cubans simply released their birds, in retaliation for the ban apparently. And now they are everywhere on the small island. And according to one tour guide, you may be fined up to $500 for killing one of these chickens, which I was glad to learn because my automatic reaction to chickens that annoy me is to wring their necks. (I have a history of raising chickens and working at a chicken ranch when I was in high school.)
The weather was warm, like 80 degrees, so it was tee shirt, shorts, and flip flops weather. Duval Street is great for people watching and it reminds me of Bourbon Street in New Orleans. So I noticed that the first 3 girls (females under 40 are girls to me) wearing cutoff jean were cut low enough, or was that high enough, that the bottoms of their butt cheeks were exposed. Three in a row! Was that a coincidence? Or is that a contemporary fashion statement that I wasn't up to speed on? Seems funny in hindsight considering that while we were having lunch at a beach side restaurant, the girls walking by in bikinis had 100% of their butt cheeks exposed. Drat! What can I say? Maybe I'm getting old, but when I was young, bikinis still left something to the imagination. Not so much now.
Lots of excellent restaurants and we ate a lot of local seafood. Conch ceviche, conch fritters, lobster mac n cheese, yellowtail snapper - which is the best fish species I tried, mahi mahi, and grouper. The best restaurants were in the $$$ group; I think we got a pizza one night (when we needed a reprieve from seafood) where the price was $$. And you find some of the best restaurants in unexpected places. Like Oceans 305 in an Islamorada RV park. Or Square Grouper in a boat yard. This was a high end restaurant with the parking lot surrounded by large storage racks of many dozens of boats, some of them pretty high end too, with those multiple large HP outboard engines. Ah, but we ate well.
This was supposed to be a fishing report, but as you can see from the thread title, it isn't. Oh, we had planned to fish and made arrangements with a guide out of Islamorada. It got a little breezy on Tuesday. The guide called and said the wind was forecast at 30 mph for Wednesday and Thursday, so all fishing trips were cancelled. There were still small craft warnings on Friday, although we saw some small boats wandering out of the canals in Cape Coral that day. So thanks to Hurricane Nicole I never strung up a rod on this trip. Even though Nicole mainly hit Florida north of Miami, there was enough wind down south to make boating and fishing impractical and impossible.
In Islamorada the closest we got to any fish was Robbie's Marina, where they feed tarpon and other fish that hang around the docks. We saw a few tarpon and nurse sharks north of 50 pounds cruising there. I glimpsed a couple of other fish zooming around there but wasn't able to identify them. It turns out that feeding the tarpon is sketchy (you can buy a bucket of bait fish for $4.50) because the damn pelicans that hang out on the dock will steal your bait fish. They are quite aggressive and will bite! I could learn to hate pelicans more than chickens lurking in restaurants. I was nearly tempted to string up a fly rod and try casting from the docks since the area was fairly well protected from the wind. But I think it's frowned upon if not prohibited. An interesting thing about the area and marinas in particular is the boats! There are thousands of boats. And not just a few flats skiffs powered by a single outboard motor. But scads of boats for heading out on the blue water, powered by two, three, and even four large outboards. It isn't the least bit uncommon to see boats with three or four 300 HP motors, and a few with four 400 HP outboards. I can't believe the number of boats we saw that would be priced as high as the value of my house. Simply amazing! There is a lot of money in south Florida.
We visited a friend and former co-worker in Cape Coral. There has been a lot of clean up since Hurricane Ian blew through, but the amount of damage is very extensive. My friend's boat got tipped with the bow down in the water on the boat lift, but was otherwise undamaged. He was extremely lucky. Across the canal was a boat sitting in someone's back yard that will need to be moved back into the water. Somehow. We saw boats that were listing, sunk, and even sitting in a median strip of an arterial street. At least that one is accessible to load on a trailer and move back wherever it's supposed to be. And it's troubling to see so many homes with roofs covered with blue tarps. FEMA puts numbers on some of the tarps, which we interpreted as a priority system for which ones the contractors should repair first and so on down the line. We saw how a lot of the newer homes are constructed with the yard built up a few feet where the house floor plan footprint is. Those are the ones that didn't get water inside. We met a guy at the airport whose house was not built those 3 or 4 feet higher. He got 2 feet of water in his house and 3 feet in the garage. So everything sitting on the floor was destroyed, along with the bottom 2 feet of the walls, baseboards, and moulding, sheetrock, and insulation, etc. A total mess, and he can't live in the house for who knows how long. It will be a year or two before a lot of the area is put back together. And some of it never will. Not everyone has flood and hurricane insurance. I think a lot of people were hit so hard economically that they just walked away from damaged and destroyed homes to start over somehow, as best they can.
I even took a few pictures. If I get them uploaded to my computer I might add some to this unfishing report. Of course there were no photos of fish this trip. Maybe another time.
