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Helms Alee
Several times I've started an entry like this, to try and explain what's going on, but never finished it; Often, it gets caught up in the background details and ends up looking like whining or ranting. So how about I tell you what's happening, and only drop a hint or two as to why. If you don't get it (and I'm guessing many will not), 5 paragraphs of ranting won't help.
It's no secret that my life changed greatly in mid-2008 when we abandoned the mainland for the island life; The rate of that change has built since then, slowly at first, and becomes now such a force as can hardly be adequately chronicled. It will be hard to nail down the exact day that I stopped being a computer person who played with boats, and started being a boat person who played with computers, but I am relatively certain that centerline was crossed this year. Beyond this, it is also true that the lives of Grace and myself continue to tumble away from the traditional American rat race of debt-fueled consumption that compels work.
I aggressively pursue all available recreational boating hours, with the intention of logging these towards the experiential requirement of a USCG 100-ton Master license, preferably with a sail endorsement. Yes, sail, I sail too. We'll get to that. Also, we ditched the unfortunate inboard/outboard propelled bowrider by way of Craigslist (and an enterprising fellow from Miami who was all too eager to pick it up) and replaced it with this:
It's a late-1990s 17-foot Angler, with a (2-stroke) Johnson 88 Special outboard engine, and a nice Garmin chart plotter with depth transducer. A foot shorter than the bowrider, and a few hundred pounds lighter, but easily twice the boat. Also the only boat we ever trailered and launched. It's shown here sitting in about a foot of water on the sandbar south of Lois Key.
Shortly after getting and launching this boat, Grace and I were married at the Marathon courthouse by an assistant clerk, on our sixth anniversary. Married life has been incredibly happy, and I've no doubts whatsoever that it was the right choice. I have a wife who loves the sea, maybe even more than me.
Shortly after this, I joined the Key West Community Sailing Center and began taking regular lessons. Here's a shot I took as I worked the starboard jib sheet on an Oday 19 (next week, I start singlehanding). These photos are somewhat rare, as being a sailing student demands attention, and more often than not, electronics are left at the clubhouse and not taken aboard. You may imagine I'm a very eager student, reading all the books I possibly can, and sailing as often as I possibly can.
But since sailing lessons only happen on weekends, and I still have to build sea time, this means we fire up the powerboat often. Since the Angler is a relatively skinny-water boat, it can even go into the backcountry at lowest-low tide (the bowrider could only go on a relatively high tide). So my new wife and I often find ourselves scouting around Johnston Key Channel, Pumpkin Key, and so forth. Pictured above is a baby blacktip shark off our port bow.
All this learning also requires playtime, and for that, there are our friends The Yankee Freedom, whose amazing catamaran ferry takes us to Dry Tortugas National Park. We were here last week, and despite the presence of numerous moon jellies, we snorkeled for hours around the pilings near the northern beach on Garden Key, and saw enormous brain coral, mangrove snapper, parrotfish, angelfish, crabs, and who knows what else. We gotta get an underwater camera to show you this stuff. We didn't know until we got home, that the area is marked 'advanced snorkelers', which is not a term we'd generally applied to ourselves.
Nice shark cloud, eh? Well anyway, there's also the things you can't photograph. We don't have cable television. Careful management of air conditioning and computers has resulted in a nearly-$50 savings on our power bill (and we are still scheming for another $50). Driving the car isn't something we do very often, due to the expense of gasoline. Preparation of three vegetarian meals per day by Grace is the rule, not the exception. I quit my job of nearly 12 years and rely solely on a single consulting gig, whose hours of operation I enforce strictly. I no longer read websites pertaining to world news, politics, or finance (why keep punishing yourself with depressing news when there's an ocean to deal with?). Positive changes like these are occurring monthly. Weekly. Daily.
I don't know what we've become anymore, but I like it much more than what we were. All of our precious animals (who get walked, played with, and petted now more than ever) do too.
This is what we have been up to in 2011. But it also is not these things, it is a gestalt, a psychological pattern greater than the sum of these parts. If you get it, I'm glad. If you don't, that's cool too. You can't find it on television.
Kings Of Blue Crab
In early 2009, you may recall our crabbing adventures. I used a dinghy with an electric motor to work a couple crab traps in Bay Point. It yielded half a dozen or more crabs every few days, and was probably a money-losing venture because we fed these crabs some very nice bait. Most times, it was barely enough for one or two little crab cakes. Cute.
We had found the occasional small blue while working our stone crab traps, so we knew they were around, but frankly we had poor luck trapping crabs. We (or I, at least) didn't think much of it until one particular day, when we were riding our bicycles around the mysterious trails of the Lower Keys in the late afternoon, when we came to a mud hole we were already familiar with, only to count nine blue crabs swimming around in it. That day was December 11, 2010. I whipped out the iPhone and shot this photo:
We vowed to come back the next day with a dip net and see if we could get down to business.
We bungee-corded the dip-net and a small strainer to our bicycles, and also brought tongs and gloves to help deal with errant crabs. We hopped on our bikes and got on our way, late in the afternoon of December 12, 2010. We barely got our feet wet, sticking mostly to the very edges of the salt marsh, reaching with the dip net to score nine medium-sized blue crabs:
Which we (Grace, mostly) picked into a small bowl thus:
Which made the most absolutely amazing blue crab pasta with some shrimp from Fanci Seafood nearby:
At this point, we were beginning to get excited. We'd found a natural food source, reachable without fossil fuels and requiring no bait (just our Florida saltwater fishing licenses). And we had the means to process and eat it. And it tasted really good. And nine crabs would have been considered a great catch back in the Bay Point trapping days. Nine crabs. Cute.
On December 19th, we re-deployed, again in the late afternoon. When we arrived at the salt marsh, we heard other people talking to each other and... what were they doing? Stomping around in the salt marsh. And they carried buckets as well as dip nets. They were very friendly, said they were just leaving, and wished us luck. After having very little luck netting at the periphery of the salt marsh, I realized what had to happen. In blue crabbing, as with life,
If you really want blue crabs badly enough, you will go out stomping and wading in the salt marsh.
I was wearing a very nice pair of boots that I'd hardly ever worn before, Columbia hiking boots from the Mast General Store near Boone, North Carolina. Timidly at first, I stomped through the mud, felt the cold water circulating inside my boot, and began to wander around the water. Not very far, as it turned out, but enough. Locating and landing these suckers had gotten noticeably easier.
That day, we came home with 14 blue crabs. And Grace was no longer content to remain out of the action. She was chomping at the bit, demanding that we get a dip net for her and bring her water shoes next time. Because we already took for granted that there would be a next time. Anyway, back to the 14 crabs,
We got em all home alive again, and they went great steamed with Old Bay again, and Grace worked several hard hours to make the most amazing soup I have ever tasted, a healthy Maryland Crab Soup (recipe here), which fed us for several days:
So the crab fishing was beginning to hit its stride, We were more confident in our ability to stomp through marshes and get to the crabs, and we were starting to use Google Maps to locate where our next stomping-and-wading grounds would be. I think they're here. No, look at these shallows here, right next to the thicker mangroves. We were getting into the game of feeding ourselves free protein, and we were awesome, and we had 14 crabs to prove it. Fourteen crabs. Cute.
We were scheduled to deploy on Christmas Day, but we couldn't wait. On December 24, we went out to the crabbing grounds with two dip nets. Grace wore her water shoes. As we were arriving, we passed some other folks who were just leaving. For the next few hours, we had the crabbing grounds to ourselves. We both stomped around the marshes, sometimes calling them out, "Medium bogey, 10-o-clock," and so forth. Sometimes we landed two or even three in the same net before dumping them into the aluminum strainer where we kept them covered with a damp towel. Grace pioneered entire new crabbing holes, stomping and wading farther out than ever before, finding more awesome marshes full of blue crabs. Come to the entrance, wade down Crab Alley and into Crab Bay. And of course, catch Crab Crab.
We had the time of our lives. And we caught 17 crabs. It was a glorious fiesta:
By this trip, we had begun to be much more selective, by which I mean we were no longer accepting female crabs, and we'd begun to not even accept smallish males. As patrons of the crabbing grounds, we had also become stewards of its conservation. Thus the count of 17 crabs, though not greatly increased in number from before, represented all medium males, with the occasional large'ish one, yielding most of a pound of picked crab meat.
As we began to bungee the gear back onto our bicycles for the trip home, other crabbing parties arrived and chatted with us. We left you plenty, good luck! And as we got home and settled into another evening of picking crabs and drinking Miller Lite, we made evermore grandiose plans for the next outing: Techniques, gear, locations.
The next morning, we noticed something else: Our bodies hurt. As it turns out, an afternoon of crabbing works every muscle in your body. By the next morning, all your joints are aching badly and your skin may be sun-damaged. It feels as though you'd played a full game of rugby the night before. Fortunately, it takes more than that to stop us. We re-deployed on January 1, and crabbed until sunset:
The New Years Day crabbing trip was, like all the others before it, incredibly fun. Grace once again waded out into new waters to discover richer crabbing grounds. We were more selective than ever before, this time catching two crabs that even a Marylander like Grace would call "large". We only took home 12 crabs, but they sure were 12 that counted, picking down to almost a pound of crab meat:
Here I am posing with my largest of the day. The photo may make him look small, but compare him to the size of my hand. That is a pretty good sized crab, and Oskar noticed:
Grace made the most amazing crab stuffed mushrooms. If you die without experiencing these, you have led a hollow existence:
By January 8, we were very ready to re-deploy. Grace with the dive-boots, me with the Columbia boots. Grace with a smaller dip net, me with a larger one. This time, we brought a bucket instead of the strainer, as capacity had begun to be an issue. We brought our gear out through the marsh to a centrally-located place in the mangroves, in order to avoid doubling back to deposit our catch. We jammed to Pandora and sang while catching crabs and drinking beer. It was the most incredible time ever, I landed an enormous crab, the kind we speak of in hushed tones as "granddad":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o_R6La1VP0
Grace, not to be outdone, also landed a granddad of her own:
No sooner had it begun, than it was over, maybe 90 minutes later. We were beginning to run out of capacity in our 5-gallon bucket! I didn't know how many crabs we had, but I knew it was a lot. The bucket was so heavy that I had to drag it through the water as we marched back to our bicycles, letting the buoyancy of the bucket assist me in hauling it. We pedaled very slowly and carefully home, as upsetting the bucket and losing this precious catch would surely be a fate worse than death.
Once we got them home and started cleaning them and placing them into the strainer to be steamed, we realized that for the first time ever, we'd caught so many that we'd have to cook them in multiple batches. Only once this was complete, did we get an accurate count:
Batch one, fourteen crabs.
Batch two, sixteen crabs. Thirty total. Thirty crabs in ninety minutes, including those two monsters we got. We were no longer just having fun and hoping to catch dinner. We had crabbing down to a science, after catching 82 crabs in 5 trips. Our 30 crabs picked down to a pound and a half of crab meat. The six crab cakes were fat enough to make any hamburger look small, and we still had half a pound of crab meat left for crab imperial the next day. By now, we'd also learned to cut the carcass in half horizontally (not vertically) when picking, allowing access to more chambers of meat at a faster rate.
Look at that claw! That's not a stone crab claw, buddy. That's from a blue. A blue crab claw of this size tastes so much sweeter than stone crab.
I will at this time graciously accept our crown. We are the kings of blue crab.
-Chris
The Fall
"Get busy living, or get busy dying." - Andy Dufresne
Shortly after writing this last entry, I was overtaken by something of a financial windfall that came my way contingent on me working every waking hour to meet arbitrarily tight deadlines imposed upon me by some particularly difficult customers. I nonetheless performed, throughout September and October, because The System had me. I had a Honda Element to finish paying off, and more expenses to cut for a presumably tighter future. Yes, Master.
We did go a few places, but our outings were primarily restricted to parks and recreation. We truly came to discover and enjoy Bahia Honda State Park in early October. We walked the trails that run through No Name Key.
By the time November dawned, I had paid off that Honda Element and further cut monthly expenditures by almost $900. So began the acceleration of my divorce from The System, to which I had been wedded for some years now.
It would be a mischaracterization to say that I had spent freely; Indeed I had been chided in the past for not flaunting it, having gotten it. I preferred cash-and-carry in all situations. My car had been nonetheless financed, owing somewhat to the haste with which we had moved to the Keys in 2008.
I retain a few lines of credit, which I could use to purchase just about anything I could imagine. Fortunately for my own future, I no longer imagine owning more possessions, for with them comes the reality of unnecessary toil, which brings us more to the point: I love my life, I love my home, and I love my family. I don't enjoy working long hours just to get more gadgets and pay debts; As enviable as the revenue figures may seem, I consider this to be slavery to desire. Failure.
Aside from the purely financial aspects, other right changes were made in life, to include the rediscovery of baking bread,
The joy of clam pasta,
And, not just the discovery of blue crabs in Cudjoe Key, but much success in the dip-netting of same (you don't even need bait):
There's nothing in the whole world cheaper and healthier than free protein, that you hunted yourself, after riding to your blue crab honey hole on a bicycle. We also learned to identify the freshest green coconuts and drink coconut water, another free perk that comes with the zipcode.
We didn't stop there, either. Our lease is up in the springtime, and with its termination comes a great opportunity to trim even more fat from our monthly expenditures, if we have the courage. We began preparations by throwing out papers, books, optical media, bag after bag after bag of trash, including a Honda Element run to the dump which cost about $18 at 6 cents a pound. We've reduced close to half a ton of stuff, but we've only just begun. Nearly all of our furniture is likely to get the axe, being of the large, heavy sort. Relics, we would say, of a life we no longer want. There's still quite a few things that, having more value than trash, need selling.
Our plan for spring 2011 includes much smaller living accommodations, eating as much as possible by foraging for fruit and hunting seafood, with the end result of less dependence, on paid labor, on money, on whatever. Just less dependence. And if we should decide not to work, we'll not stay at home fretting over how we're going to eat. We'll go out crabbing and fishing all day and have a great time.
I suspect we'll be happier than even the most decadent day of 2007.
A New Hope
May the usual disclaimer suffice: Kindly forgive my lack of progress herein. Here's how spring and summer went:
First, we took up sailing. Daysailing on the Schooner Appledore 2 in Key West, before she headed north to Maine for the summer.
The Appledore 2 actually won a regatta this year, the Wreckers Cup, a race under sail from Key West Harbor to Sand Key. We were on the ship at the time, faithfully working to rid the boat of excess beer. Here's Sand Key Light:
Grace bought me birthday dinner at Sunset Key.
Then, there was a large amount of concern, prompted by government-back predictions, that our Paradise was going to be destroyed due to the negligence of a few jerks at British Petroleum. Although the Keys apparently beat the odds (by way of the Loop Current moving to an advantageous configuration), it was a very depressing time. We went to the Dry Tortugas while we still could, fearing ourselves among its last visitors. The trip was another birthday gift from Grace to me (thanks again). Here's Fort Taylor:
We came by way of the Yankee Freedom II ferry, although other folks came via a fancy seaplane (cue Treetop Flyer):
The beaches of the Dry Tortugas were like nothing I'd ever seen before.
This was my first time ever snorkeling (but not the last!)
We were very enchanted by this, so we repeated the act of snorkeling many times in Cudjoe Bay near home, as well as the American Shoal Light (5 miles south on the reef). I captained the 18-foot bowrider through the treacherous seas (okay so we can only make it in the bowrider if NOAA is calling for 1-foot seas or less).
That is the light. The water visibility can be amazing here, just like at the Tortugas.
Finally, we decided to stop burning so much gas in the powerboat, and we kayaked around a bit.
About two weeks ago, we decided to check out the Tarpon Belly Keys:
We made it pretty quickly, after carefully timing the tides to carry us North from the Blimp Road ramp where we had launched. Aren't we smart? We found a nice beach on the southwest side of Tarpon Belly Key and swam for hours.
Eventually, we decided the tides had probably turned, and it was time to head back. We picked a bad time to turn south across Cudjoe Channel towards blimp road. The wind was picking up and sending whitecaps from southeast to northwest. For some reason, we figured we'd faced odds like this before and made it. I'm pretty sure we had. But not, it turns out, in water quite this deep. More to the point, we found ourselves nearly parallel to those oncoming whitecaps, which is not what you want to do with a kayak, and the reason for that is, it has a tendency to pitch over and send you swimming. Which is what happened. Grace chased down our gear as it floated with us in 9-12 feet of swiftly-moving, bumpy water. A damned inconvenient situation, that. Fortunately it only lasted approximately 5 minutes, before we were saved by The IV Seas, a 25-foot Mako. Here's a picture of that boat homeported in our neighborhood canal in Cudjoe:
They dropped us and our kayak back off at the Blimp Road ramp, and we stayed indoors after that. We beat Zelda 2 for the Nintendo Entertainment System:
and Castlevania for the NES:
And Ancient Land of Y's for the Apple IIGS. And Secret Of Monkey Island for DOS/VGA. And, okay, enough indoors stuff. We eventually got back on the water:
And that was my summer. There's more to it than that (I lost a ton of income, faced insolvency, then got it all back at the last minute), but it isn't important.
Paradiso
Eventually, of course, the wind changed.
No more 20-knot assaults out of the north. Sometimes now, the seas are calm enough to permit my little 18-foot bowrider to go into the blue-water ocean again. For the patient, turbulent times eventually give way to more peaceful times. Unfortunate things still happen, and sometimes there are still 2-foot seas in Cudjoe Bay, but these are, I am happy to report, more of an exception now than a rule. In a fine (for me) reversal of fortune last week, it was me towing a disabled boater into port.
I've been riding 10 miles a day on the ole Schwinn, and twice now I've (we've) done the 15.5 mile ride from US-1 through Middle Torch Key and Big Torch Key and back. By my estimate, I've put about 600-650 miles on the Schwinn now, and as you may have guessed, I'm now encountering maintenance issues. The Schwinn Crest is a fine casual cruiser, but my 200+ mile/month habit is beginning to knock me out of the 'casual biker' category and more into the 'srs biz on two wheels' category. I share your stereotypes about bicyclers too, with their expensive machines and seemingly fitness-crazed lifestyles, so it is with some alarm that I woke up one day to discover that I am one. So here I am, learning bicycle maintenance to keep the Schwinn alive as I shop for a nice Cannondale. Or Trek. Or Specialized. I don't know what I'll get yet, and I scarcely even know what I want. But I know how and where I ride, and that seems like a pretty good start. Despite what pedaling into that nasty winter wind has done to my knees, I am simply incomplete without a good 10-mile ride. Yeah, the cardio and weight control are cool, but they're no longer closely related to why I do it. My name is Christopher and I'm a bicycle nut.
But that's not all. The Fleet has added a third ship (for those keeping score, yes the Porta-Bote is still here), with the re-acquisition of a kayak, and she's a beaut, too:
It's a brand spankin new Hobie Odyssey, and although I initially had great difficulty discovering a reliable way to secure it atop the Honda Element, I eventually got the hang of it, and we discovered that the sheltered, upper-estuarial waters of northern Cudjoe Key offer a fine alternative when the other waters are too rough, or the winds too high. Shallow, perhaps, but that's no challenge for the kayak's 2-inch draft.
So we're all doing fine, even Colby, and I'm still in school struggling to find the time to compose enormous papers for Composition class as I attempt to balance all the fun outdoor toys with ever-increasing work demands. But it all works out, and frankly, as long as that is the most of my worries, I'm okay with that. I'm mostly concerned with maximizing my enjoyment of the space I have here, the sun, saltwater, and trails of the Lower Keys, and imagine my surprise at discovering that none of this ever gets old. Despite the seemingly limited (in terms of square mileage) space, enjoyment only begets more enjoyment. I guess I'm doing something right, because I'm still not writing letters to the Citizen or bigpinekey.com moaning about how the Keys aren't what they used to be. I leave that to other people, and they're apparently pretty good at it. Speaking of printed public moaning:
(Here it is, kids, C-Dawg's Post-Political Declaration of 2010)
Lately I'm losing interest in labels and outrage of nearly all sorts, and it is this to which I attribute the utter lack of political content in belgo.com in recent entries (years). It isn't that I've forgotten what I disliked, and it certainly isn't that I've ceased to disagree with government policies. In part, recent uncivil protests and harshly divisive rhetoric have made a profound point to me, and it isn't the one they were trying to make. In part, I've come to accept that whatever course of action I take is unlikely to matter. The one time I did write a long position piece and publish it in the public rags, I got about 3 responses about how long and boring it was, and one response from a person who seemed to be genuinely reached by it, but he wasn't newly-persuaded, mind you, merely agreeing because we already felt the same way. Lastly, in part, I've come to be more absorbed in my silly little life here, and that silly little life is going to be largely the same no matter who's in what office or who spits and curses at whom. I'll still hold positions, mind you, and I will express them in exactly one place, where they are solicited and counted with an optical scanner by Monroe County. That's it. You can have your Tea Parties, Coffee Parties, deficit crises, wars, just don't expect me to give up my morning ride or go to your meetings or read your vitriolic rants for what is essentially team spectator sports by any other name. This is the age of the post-political Christopher Shepherd, and he doesn't care what you think of that. You can call it apathy, but as I've said, I'll still vote.
(If you think that's something, just wait till I get started on religion and mainland USA. Hint: My attitude on those things is almost exactly the same as the political posture I've just expressed. Enjoy your beautiful world. I'll enjoy mine, and you can bank on that.)
Now I think I've said enough. And if you'll excuse me, tomorrow's gonna be a gorgeous day. :)
-Chris
