Alonzo's Updated

When asked I replyme preferred place to eat fish is at Alonzo's on the boardwalk in Key West Bight. 

I was not alone in that preference as thay had a loyal following. I use the past tense advisedly as they are not currently open and mussels - alive! alive oh! - must be pursued elsewhere.  

It's proper name is Alonzo's Oyster Bar and they offer live oysters from all over the place as the modern fashion will have it. I am not a fan of eating live snot balls, thanks and I limit myself to my general principle that if I go out to eat I expect the chef to have applied heat to the stuff. Cooked not raw is my motto. 

 Apparently Alonzo Cothron and Berlin Felton decided they need a waterfront fish house in 1947 and in those days the fishing fleet tied up in Key West Bight so this was the obvious spot.  From the Florida State Archive this picture of the "good old days:"

I ambled by a few days ago and wasn't I surprised to find the place torn up. Give them credit, considering they were founded in 1947... a freshen up was probably in order. Mind you it was pretty nice by my estimation before it got cleaned up. 

 If you want oysters they are still available round the corner.

 As the work continues inside.

 And there is a crane out front tearing up the docks near the Conch Republic Seafood restaurant.  So much so they put in a  detour round the back which was a different way to walk. Small changes in routine amuse me. Which is just as well as I'm working day shift  now and I sleep at  night like a normal person. That's taking some getting used to but I'll manage.

I included a picture of the Galleon Resort across the way just because...The Bight waterfront is owned by the city which leases the land to the businesses. There is a city board to regulate the rents and I have to say it is a brilliant plan as the city pulls in rent every year and the area is vibrant and busy and a great attraction. Even with marinas filled with recreational boats rather than more colorful working shrimp boats which have moved to Stock Island.

And here they are lining up for the Ultimate Controlled Adventure on a giant catamaran known in the trade as a "head boat" - because they carry many heads and they count heads before they come back to the dock. Leaving customers floating around at dive sites all night is bad for business.  So make sure your head gets counted if you take a trip on one of these boats. They are low key and people enjoy them I'm told. In my world the Ultimate anything is the final or last one. I trust it wasn't for this crowd.

Land Fishing

So here's the conundrum: you like to eat seafood but you don't fish...Well obviously you find a restaurant and order a fried fish sandwich, or if you are feeling less inclined to the starches you order a grilled fish on a caesar  salad and then you thank me for reminding you of two of the best local dishes you can find in the Lower Keys. Let's face it, there are tons of excellent eateries and dozens of styles and ethnicities of foods cooked for us but Key West is a former commercial seaport. So we want fish, it stands to reason, especially if you live here. 

My wife loves Fishbusterz so I love Fishbusterz, especially as I know we are getting seafood after she makes Fishbusterz noises. Key West Old Town residents have an excellent seafood place on Eaton Street which also offers seating with cooked seafood for consumption on premises. I have heard only good things about them but as I live (and my wife cooks) outside Key West we gravitate to the shops that involve less traffic and parking issues than those downtown. Having said that I feel an urge coming on to explore an Eaton Street fish sandwich...

Fishbusterz offers the proper range of local seafood as you might expect. However their history is quite interesting as they were started as a business to support local boats and offer a market for local fishing. Checking a  story I did on this place in 2008 you can see they have evolved over the past decade. 

They started out selling cooked food while highlighting their intimate connection to the fishing fleet. It was at a time when the commercial fishing docks on Stock Island were under threat of development and Fishbusterz stepped in to keep the fleet  from disintegrating. As it was commercial boats had retreated to the Stock Island docks from Key West Bight, pushed out by massive development.

 And so you can still find locally caught seafood  for sale...locally.

 And if you fancy a conch feast you can buy five pounds of the stuff right here. I am not a huge fan of conch or abalone (on the west coast) as I feel it's one of those foods that gets its flavor from the breading or the lemon juice or whatever coking agent is used. However I am almost alone in that, and this stuff is massively popular.

 Limes and lemons are for sale too, essential accouterments for fruits of the sea.

 And let us not forget suaces and spices from the Key West Spice Company.

 Clothing of one sort or...

 ...another.

 Yes and we should all love Stock Island, shouldn't we?

Fishbusterz is on the main drag from Highway One which starts out at the traffic light where the street is called Macdonald and then the road evolves into Maloney -don't ask, it just does- and on the right just past West Marine the low blue building will appear will all its fishy goodness. 

Dineatfish- A Fish Restaurant

It's at Mile Marker 14.5  which is close to Baby's Coffee at Baypoint. It's been through a few transformations, most recently as Kaya Eats, an oddly named place. Now it's known simply as "Fish" which is not an easy name to look up online. A nice clean uncluttered interior:

They built the place alongside Highway One and made a kind of sports bar out of it, years ago: 

It faces west over the water and the mature trees on the south side give you the impression of eating in a forest. Happy hour is one of those pernicious institutions that causes alcohol to be sold cheap, I got my old favorite a bottle of Yuengling while my wife branched out and tried a ginger beer mojito and it wasn't at all bad. 

We decided to have three appetizers for an early dinner, First  we had curried mussels and they were very good, not too hot but spicy enough with a green coconut curry. Then we tried the pork tacos which I found a bit sweet but they got five stars from my wife, so what do I know?

 I enjoyed the glass my Yuengling came in, putting me in mind of old single cylinder motorcycles, known as "thumpers."

The rice balls were superb, and tasted as close to the homemade ones I used to get as a child made by my great aunt. They were less a cheese puff and more rice and tomato inside with pieces of red bell pepper that give them a slightly tart refreshing taste. I could have had another helping of these.

My wife noticed the interior seemed less noisy than it had during the Kaya period. Also the service was great, attentive not fussy and prompt. 

 We made reservations for the Valentine's day dinner which as I am working means we will have to come early. I guess that means we liked it. Lower Keys eateries are doing well. Thank god for snowbirds who demand more!

Here's the link: Fish

Bridge Fishing

From November 2007 this essay on fishing which, as will become apparent is an activity about which I know nothing. I had lost track but it seems there are about 1260 essays logged on this blog from when I started in Summer 2007. I had a few to choose among for these replays. Here's the thing: because I live in the Keys I am supposed to enjoy fishing: but I don't. I have fished, I have felt the wiggle of the captured critter on both hook and spear, I have whacked fish on the head, I have filleted them (inexpertly I might add) and the whole exercise fills me with horror. Beyond all the blood guts and scales I find the notion that I should spend hours of my precious life staring idiotically into the deep blue sea hoping to pit my wits against a fish to be...grotesque. Worse yet the fish might prove beyond doubt they are smarter than I. And my final argument against casting a line is that in the Keys there are numerous excellent fish shops that sell 'em fresh and raw, and even the most hopeless hole-in-the-wall has to work very hard indeed to make a hash of a plate of fish inevitably cooked by frying grilling or blackening. This enigmatic chair disappeared from the old bridge connecting Big Pine Key to the misnomered West Summerland Key, a few days after I photographed it. Damned if I know how they got it there...Just another fishing mystery, I suppose. And believe me when I say that I am very much alone in my despair at the entire culture of fishing. To live in the Keys and not to care to fish is like a priest living in a brothel, not only is it a stupid waste of time in your neighbor's eyes it is damned near immoral. And I even have a skiff at my dock, which I take out all the time! Just to go swimming? How bizarre!

Its a sad day when I have to haul the boat out of the water, but its just too cold to go swimming anymore, with air temperatures under 80 degrees and water temperatures barely holding at 75, though they both feel far lower. The boat is now on the trailer enjoying my mechanical attentions before it gets set aside for the next few months. Were I an angler I would be reduced, as it were, to fishing from a bridge; as it is I'm just going to miss wandering around the back country and swimming in the tepid, clear waters of the Keys.
Driving down the Overseas Highway if one can take one's eyes off the turquoise waters, there are simply tons of people fishing from the bridges formed by the old road which was created from Flagler's original Oversea Railroad bridges which are now approaching their one hundredth birthdays, and remain as solid as ever despite the State's fearfulness.

Monroe County works at keeping the near shore waters clean, providing containers for unneeded mono filament line which kills birds, fish and mammals when abandoned in the waters, as it usually is. There are also lots of trash cans placed everywhere a needy fisherman might want to use one. They don't prevent trash from ending up along the road, but the trucks which haul garbage from Key West to the mainland since the incinerator (that produced electricity from waste as a bonus) was shut down in favor of a sweetheart deal to a garbage hauler, let fly a whole lot more trash along the road from their inadequately covered trailers than fishermen dropping wrappers and cans.

Florida residents, as far as I can figure, don't need a license to fish saltwaters from a structure and locals do love to chase fish from these old bridges. You could call it a family sport. Some people are elaborate anglers, planting tents, hanging bright gas lanterns, sitting in chairs, sipping (sipping?) beer and reviewing the state of the world. Others head out with a bait net and lots of hope. All they need is a little help from their friends.At night their lights give them the appearance of campers huddled round the campfire,telling impossible fishing stories, possibly the best part of the whole standing around waiting for a bite thing. By day women bend over parapets revealing their lack of coverage, men prop their guts on the same concrete barriers, and families who fish together frequently, it seems, stick together. Its all terribly jolly.However the evidence of the lack of casting abilities of the many, droops from the overhead cables that carry electricity up and down the Keys.
It depends on your point of view whether these strands remind you of Spanish Moss or worse. For me it depends on my mood but I do enjoy seeing the spoons twirling in the sunset winking at me as I motorcycle by.

The sun drops on the end of another day, and aside from the few anglers out in the cold front breezes of a crystal clear night, commuters zip by on the new bridges, the odd motorcycle rumbles by and the tide comes running in bringing with it who knows what.
Only the fishers of fish know, lucky them. I wish I had it in me to be one of them.

The Back Of Bahia Honda

It looked aground as I looked around, I could see the anchor line pointing to shore. Perhaps the low low tide had taken the skipper by surprise though we were coming up on a full moon about then so s/he should have been ready for that. In a north wind anchoring south of the islands is easy and comfortable though why the boat felt the need to be so close inshore I wouldn't know. It was another in a series of good looking days in the Keys, this time near Bahia Honda.
The seas were flat and the view south toward Cuba seemed endless.Tourists sometimes wonder if you can see Cuba's mountains from the Keys but you can't. If you stand at sea level you can see about half a dozen miles depending on your actual height. The calculation is known as height of eye. Multiply your height of eye's square root by 1.17. The easy example is standing with your eye 9 feet above sea level puts your square root at 3 times 1.17 equals three and a half miles. As Cuba is ninety miles away at it's nearest point that puts it out of reach. A 900 foot mountain would be visible from thirty five miles which added to your height of eye would amount to to less than 40 miles. Here endeth the lesson as I have exhausted my meager mathematical skills (and I am not completely certain I have it right but it's close enough). The long and the short is that Cuba is always out of sight.
Cheyenne has been fishing and chewing on the dead carcasses of the fish killed in the Great Cool Down of 2010. The beaches have been littered with corpses and her diet has, as a result become a little too rich in dried fish.The fish are everywhere, slowly returning to their elemental forms. We explored the waterfront at the south end of the old Bahia Honda Bridge. There is what appears to be an old pump station built out of limestone along side the original, decrepit water pipe that the Navy installed in World War Two to supply the Navy Base in Key West with a regular supply of water.

The pipeline is rather the worse for wear which is okay as the new pipe runs alongside the Highway. It was of course a larger diameter pipe that they installed when it was built alongside the new highway in 1982. Considering the shortage of water in the aquifer in South Florida and the burgeoning population I'd recommend using a rainwater recovery system like the one that came with my house. But drinking rain water scares a lot of people. Conchs used to do it all the time in the good old days when everyone had a cistern. I was so involved in taking the picture I only freaked out about Cheyenne on the precipice after she was well away from the edge. She is smarter than she looks, and I enjoy her sense of adventure. The "new" Bahia Honda bridge is on the left.I rode the old bridge on my Vespa in 1981 and have no photos nor any memory of the journey. I was young and I try not to blame my former self for my inability to record the journeys of my life.The new bridge is a very inviting four lane but the Highway Patrol is well aware of how tedious the drive on the approaches can be and because of their frequent fines in the area as people speed up on the wide bridge, this area is sometimes known as the "Lower Keys toll booth":Seven weeks ago Cheyenne was in a cage at the pound:
Now the Lower Keys are her backyard. We spent a happy 45 minutes exploring the sliver of West Summerland Key shown in the picture below.It is a never ending source of amazement to me that these islands are so under explored by residents and visitors. Which I concede is just as well or else we'd be standing shoulder to shoulder and I enjoy the solitude