Lost...

At long last... I finished our Florida movie!

In case you hadn't heard about our little adventure last Thanksgiving, I'll get you up to speed.
We had a couple Buddy passes (You can fly standby with one of these magical things) and they were about to expire. Lewis suggested that we check out Key West (because, you know, why not?) so we planned on spending a couple laid back days in the Florida Keys around Thanksgiving weekend. A couple days later Lewis came to me and said he had found a Cuban guy who would let us rent his huge  Sea Cat while we were there. We found this island called Dry Tortugas that had this awesome fort and great snorkeling and lots of sea turtles! Then we saw that they would let people camp there and, well, that sounded awesome so we decided to do it.
We jumped on a plane late on the 27th of November and got into Miami in the early hours of the 28th. We rented a car and drove about four hours to Long Key where we had rented a room on AirBNB. We got a few hours of sleep and then drove over to the place where we were going to rent the boat. We stopped and grabbed some sandwiches and chatted with a few Conchs (born and raised locals). They were both fishers and when we told them what we were planning on doing one of them said, "Wow. That's bad A. The water's supposed to be kinda rough.. But you could probably make it." That should have been our first clue.
We got to the guy's house who owned the boat and had his son do the translating because he didn't speak english. We drove the boat to a place where we could get gas and as we were pulling away the person working there pled with us, "Please don't go out. You're not going to like it. The water is *crappy* today, seriously!" That was our second clue, but we were pretty confident. (Or maybe naive?)
The first little bit was ok. It was pretty chilly, the wind was biting, and the waves were pretty choppy. The Keys are just one long chain of islands that continue pretty much unbroken for quite a ways. We stuck pretty close to shore which shielded us from the really huge waves and blocked a lot of the wind. But after Key West there is a channel about ten miles wide that wouldn't shelter us from the wind or the waves. Guys, that was crazy. The waves were between 6- 8 feet tall! I was bouncing around the boat while Lewis was holding on for dear life. We made it past the channel, bruised and exhausted, just in time to hear the coast guard come on and order a small craft advisory. We had only about an hour of sunlight left and it was another two hours at least to Dry Tortugas. We found a little island in the Wildlife Preserve that we could spend the night on and go the rest of the way to Dry Tortugas in the morning. What we didn't know was that we pulled in right at high tide, so when we woke up the next morning at low tide our boat was sitting
on
the
beach.
We tried super hard to push/dig it out, but to no avail. And the sand there isn't really sand. It's itty bitty pieces of broken coral, so it had the same effect as shards of glass when we tried to dig through it with our bare hands. Lewis' poor arms looked like he had stuck them down a garbage disposal :( We were kinda bummed that we wouldn't be able to make it to Dry Tortugas, but then we realized... That we were LITERALLY Stranded On A Desert Island and that the only responsible thing to do now was to make a survivor-type home video.
Enjoy!