Sailing The Florida Keys

The Florida Keys are much bigger than I could explore in a year let alone the mere 2 weeks we’ll have spent there. I wish we had more time to spend sailing The Florida Keys but this is the time we had and we did a lot in that time.

Our goal was Key West but it is far! We had to break it up and make stops along the way. With a sailboat, you can’t pick and choose where the stops are. A lot of The Keys don’t have great places to anchor. You want your anchorage to be protected from wind and waves as much as possible. We are learning that those are not always easy to find.

Key Largo

This was our first and longest stay. We motored the boat down from Miami in about 7 hours. We drove because there wasn’t much wind that day and we wanted to arrive before dark. Sadly, sailing the Florida Keys isn’t possible without wind.

Map Miami to Florida Keys
Miami to Key Largo Map, for Zoi!
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Overnight Guests

We’ve been in the Florida Keys for a week and the best part so far was our first sleep over! For the first time since we moved on board, we had overnight guests on Sava.

Our first overnight guests

Louis and Susan, who we know from my old job in NYC, stayed overnight on Sava last Thursday.

overnight guests on Sava
On board the dinghy!

Fortunately the weather was perfect. Winds were calm and waves were almost nonexistent, which was a relief for these two who can both get seasick and had never slept on a sailboat.

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Made it to Key Largo!

We have already learned the main lesson of sailboat life: don’t plan too much because plans will change. After 2+ weeks! on the hard, we finally got out of Ft. Lauderdale this weekend. Nothing against Ft. Lauderdale, but we were ready to get back on the water, which we did and we made it to Key Largo.

The Opposite of Smooth Sailing

When you get what you want, it may not go your way. We learned that on Saturday when we were a couple of hours in our drive to Miami and the engine conked out.

Backing up: we didn’t sail from Ft. Lauderdale because the swells were very big and the wind was right in our faces. So we motored. And even that didn’t work out so well. But we’re learning, always learning through our mistakes

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