currently in: Boca Chita Key, FL

Boca Chita is a nifty little island that used to belong to the wealthy industrialist Mark Honeywell. In the late 1930s he built a retreat here, pavilions and buildings and an ornamental lighthouse made of coral block. Then his wife died from injuries she received in a fall here, and he sold the island, which was eventually obtained by the federal government to be part of Biscayne National Park. Access is only by private boat. It costs $15 a night to tie up in the harbor here, with a payment machine (that dispenses Sacajawea dollars as change, but doesn't accept them as payment!) apparently adapted from a parking garage system. When we arrived on Thursday there were only a handful of boats here, but it filled up on the weekend with local boats, and now - Sunday morning - nearly every boat on the seawall has another boat rafted to it. We've got a small Catalina on our side, a tiny daysailer shoehorned in between us and the trawler behind us, and a couple of fancy powerboats in front of us.

It was nice to sit out a front in a place where we could get off the boat and walk around, but this island is so small that even at a meandering pace we can cover the place in half an hour. We stopped to identify the birds (ring-nosed gulls and royal terns, which have black ruffs that make them look kind of like Dilbert's pointy-haired boss) and to watch the current rip through the cut between here and Elliot Island to the south. We chit-chatted with people on other boats and spent quite a bit of time socializing with Roberta and Tucker, on the trawler Tortuga - they may also join us for the crossing to the Bahamas.

Which I'm sure you are all dying to know when it will happen. And so are we! At the moment it's looking like we might have a brief window before the next cold front on Thursday, but if things play out like they did last week, it might not happen. So in the meantime, we've decided to move up to Miami Beach, to the anchorage we used in January 2001. We've got some friends there, we might be able to go in and see a movie, and most importantly it's an easy place to leave at night, so we can get an early start and make Bimini in a day if we end up with a short window.