A Tale of Two Chemists: The Best Accommodation in Key West

The Best Accommodation in Key West

Friday 12 February 2021

The more I look around the more convinced I am that we have the best accommodation in Key West. Cotinga is of course cozy and comfortable and the location of our slip is perfect. It’s directly off the harbor boardwalk in downtown Key West, so it’s close to the action, but at the same time it is relatively quiet and peaceful. Also the cost of renting the slip at the Key West Bight Marina (a municipal facility) is very reasonable. As Gloria points out we are bringing our own boat, but nonetheless it’s probably a third of the price you would pay at the private marinas adjacent to us and a third of what Tasha paid for her AirBnB on a nighty basis. The marina staff are very pleasant and helpful and the facilities are great. All told we are really happy that we made the decision to rent the slip for a month.

However, as we settle in to our lazy life on the dock it’s easy to forget that the boat still needs looking after. So this morning we topped up the diesel tanks and refilled our jerry cans and then replaced the foot-pump on our salt-water faucet in the galley sink. Our diesel consumption has been really light. Although we run the engine twice daily to drive the refrigeration compressor we don’t use a lot of diesel at the rate we are running it. During the past month we have used the engine for ~62 hours, of which a quarter of those hours were really motoring and the remainder just battery charging and the fridge. During that time we have used ~ 35 gallons of diesel, which works out to an average of just over half a gallon per hour, which seems pretty good to me. We plan on using a gallon an hour whilst travelling which gives Cotinga a motoring range of about 800 miles. The salt-water faucet in the galley is useful for rinsing dishes when we are trying to save water. It was completely jammed up and the casing of the foot-pump had a crack so several months ago I ordered a replacement and we are only just getting around to fitting it. You really need clean seawater and it’s most use when fresh water is limited. Here in the USA that is rarely an issue, but off-shore or down in the Bahamas and Caribbean it is really useful.

Gloria spent the day doing some quilting. We have disconnected Cotinga from shore power because of concerns that we have an electrical issue that is causing rapid degradation of our “sacrificial anodes” (zincs). We’ll talk more about that when we get more information. In the mean time we were able to run a regular 120V AC power cable from the dock and Gloria plugged her machine directly in to that saving us from using our batteries and the invertor. I think she had a fun day and made good progress. I took a brief walk and we both went out for ice cream late in the afternoon. We had chicken and peppers in a sticky pineapple sauce over rice for dinner, eating out in the cockpit in the cool air. A lovely evening!

Mike

24 42.220 N, 81 06.131 W

On my walk this afternoon I stopped outside the Key West Maritime Museum. There are the rusty remains of a Cuban refugee boat made from an old truck engine with barrels welded round the outside. The Mariana landed on US soil with 23 men and one woman on board having travelled 111 miles form their departure point in Cuba. In 2015 almost 10,000 “rafters” were granted asylum in the USA having reached land, but about 3,000 that were intercepted at sea by US coast guards were sent back to Cuba as part of the “wet foot, dry foot policy”. Here is a set of photos that I of the Mariana that I thought were uninspiring as taken – so I converted them into abstract color negative images. As documentary photos they are a disaster but for their artistic merit … well you can judge for yourselves!