Garrison Bight Marina

Once upon a time I used to enjoy living on a  boat. I did it a lot in California which is odd because coastal zones in that state are foggy and cold. But there again I never even thought about air conditioning on my boat in Santa Cruz. It was quite the outdoor life for the very extended summers when it doesn't rain, nor does it get too hot. A heatwave in coastal California one could say would be a temperature of 80 degrees or more. 

These days Garrison Bight Marina located more or less in the middle of Key West on the northern side has returned to its bucolic function as low income housing in the city of millionaires. Hurricane Irma surprisingly didn't do huge amounts of damage two months ago. Of course if it was your boat that got wrecked then the damage was too much but most of the marina seemed to pull through unscathed.

A couple of sailboats sank out of sight, only the tops of their masts showing. Most of the damaged boats, and they've removed 1100 so far from the length of the Keys, were anchored out.

In nautical language a bight is an indentation in the coastline suitable for anchoring. Originally Garrison Bight was an indentation on the north shore until Henry Flagler's engineers came along and dredged up dirt to enclose the north side, as you can see in the background of these pictures, and ran their railroad out to what is now the Coastguard base and what was then the ferry terminal for Havana.

Having established that the city marina is well protected from the weather we can also understand that its a bit of a hike all the way round the Navy Base on Fleming Key, through the harbor and out into open water. A sailboat under power will easily take an hour to navigate the switchback channels to get out into open sailing waters. Thus the marina finds its true role as a place to live even though slip fees will be over a thousand dollars a month for most residents. Indeed there are often waiting lists to get a berth here. 

The marina is located right off two of the busiest streets North Roosevelt and Palm Avenue and facilities are fairly basic. You park whatever vehicle you own out in the weather and salt air.

You live cheek by jowl with your neighbors and you don't actually untie the boat and go sailing or anything like that. It's just too complicated to put everything away, unhook the air conditioning, put the plants on the dock and so on and so forth. 

Dealing with human waste is an issue too, and the city offers a boat to go around and collect all that fertilizer by pumping out holding tanks. Better to make the trek to the shower block and use the ablution facilities there. And if it's fancy you want don't look too closely.

Still the facilities are here:

And the showers are for key holders only. I've seen a lot worse in some of the marinas I have stayed at. And you are 1o minutes by bicycle from Duval Street, so there is that for good or ill.

Peaceful water living after a fashion. Boaters like to compare this to waterfront homes illustrated in glossy magazines.

The smaller the boat the more it gets used for traveling around:

Palm Avenue (wherever did they get the name?):

Looking towards North Roosevelt:

On the other side of the marina past the low bridge that is Palm Avenue (unfriendly to sailboats) lies the fishing boat dock called Charterboat Row. If you want to hire a boat and captain come by:

Some Links to other essays I've written on this intrinsic part of Key West:

Garrison Bight Marina in 2008

Garrison Bight Bridge

Spencer's Boatyard

William's Prediction

I was walking Rusty past the library a few months ago when a scooter rider rode up to me and pushed his front wheel against the edge of the sidewalk. It was a hot sunny summer afternoon rather like this one, a picture I took in the same spot a few years ago:

I didn't recognize William behind his sunglasses and baseball cap. I usually see him driving a van around town or spot him in his mechanic's shop on Truman as in this photo I took of him in 2015.

He used to be my neighbor in Sunset Marina with two small dogs on a power boat tied up a couple of slips away from my own boat, the boat my wife and I had sailed round from San Francisco, a Gemini catamaran:

He belongs to that unseen but vital underclass of Key West residents, the ones who live normal lives making things work and keeping things working in a  town dedicated to the proposition that work is a poor substitute for drinking. That attitude is promoted by the people who make money off the drinking tourism, the people who come to Key West to escape, but escape comes with an intense price tag.

William knows it and like most wage earners he has an ace-in-the-hole plan to escape should the going get too tough. By boat or by van when Key West can't accommodate his modest life he will have to back away, like all of us. We chatted for a while catching up with our separate lives, me working for the city, him still wrenching at the shop. We lamented the future of Key West a city who's gentrification seems to have picked up speed in the decades we have lived here. Our marina life is more imperiled than ever though William thinks he can hold on for a while longer. Marinas on South Stock Island are no longer the havens they once were for hobos and people who wanted cheap living on a  cheap boat.

Well, William said to me in a parting shot, what we need is a Category Five hurricane to clear out Key West. More prophetic words were never said. We got our major storm last month and lived to tell the tale. Of course the storm decimated the poorer islands, Sugarloaf to Big Pine, sparing the second homes of the wealthy in Key West. I don't think William's hope that a refreshing storm would sweep away the people with money who are the problem as viewed from the perspective of the working class.

 

Stock Island is a prime example of working stiffs' homes now at risk after Hurricane Irma. Clearly this sort of living, posted previously on this page, isn't safe and with developers hungrily eyeing Stock Island as their next land of opportunity and profit. The Seahorse Park residents on Big Pine, the hold outs have received their marching orders from the owner, a member of a prominent Key West family.

The problem for the residents is that their modest accommodations are valuable real estate in a  county that requires building permits. Knock down a trailer and you can use that as the basis for a Rate of Growth transfer and build a million dollar house in it's place anywhere you like in the county! So you can see this sort of thing is now going to get ramped up especially as trailers are clearly not safe in major hurricanes. The transformation to a millionaire society will be cloaked as a safety precaution.

It has been a long hard fought struggle to get this place cleared but it seems that at last Seahorse will be no more. So where will the residents go? Who knows but I am hearing stories of people whose homes got flattened and who have no resources and precious little help from FEMA or the Small Business people and who thus are leaving the county. Which in an ideal society doesn't sound so bad does it? Survival of the fittest and all that.

Even if the free market, so called should regulate everything as a practical matter you need people to do the grunt work. Already we are seeing new hotels set aside garret rooms for workers. Up the Keys buses assist the commutes from low cost Florida City and Homestead for hotel workers in the Upper Keys. And on Stock Island Ed Swift built Meridian West (above) to provide worker housing. Meridian East has yet to appear, if ever. There are always proposals for affordable housing though affordability is never defined. Affordable housing is a way to make development respectable. 80 new apartments are planned near the airport and of them 24  will be "affordable." Hooray!

The picture above shows what was a trailer park on Simonton Street and now is no longer in reach for working folks. So it goes... And where does this leave Hurricane Irma's effects? In my opinion the difficulties created by the storm will be felt most by the people with least. It is not going to be as William hoped, a panacea for the working stiffs. It will open up fresh opportunities for more wealth creation by the few that already have a death grip on the possibilities. A hurricane is no solution because there is no solution. The more I wonder the more clear it seems to be: Irma's legacy makes it plain that it's better to be a visitor than a resident. Whether or not you have money.

Key West Bight

Summer calm in Key West, daily highs around 80, nighttime lows near 70. Perfect.

A walk on the boardwalk through Key West Bight, known to some as the Historic Seaport. 

Public toilets - lovely! convenient! However the idiot graffiti artists asks us to flash after each use.

 So why does anyone plan not to flush? 

The harbor water taxi which ferries people to and from anchored boats. A smooth dry ride.

A cabin top picnic enjoying the almost setting sun.

I liked the picture and apologize for the fuzziness. Harbor rats doing their thing. 

Reminds me of the good old days.

There's lots to do: drink, feed the birds or fish, take pictures, watch the boats...

Or you could attempt all at once:

They call the sunset boats packed with passengers head boats or cattle boats. 

I stopped for the pause that refreshes, focaccia at Pizza Duetto my current downtown favorite snack.

The owner is from Verona and we talk Italian together and discuss the merits of emigration.

He misses New York sometimes even as he makes a success of Greene Street. 

Boats and bicycles. 

Selling tickets for the headboats as the sun sets and makes everything look gold.

Cow Key Channel

Cow Key Channel is that body of water that lies between Key West and Stock Island. Technically the water is in Monroe County and the city limits lie at the seawall so one looks out on the boats at anchor and thinks perhas they too will be regulated soon enough by the county. That's because county officials are looking to manage anchored boats like these:

The seawall along Smathers Beach doubles as sidewalk and bike path, a place to enjoy sunsets and sunrises, take exercise and sometimes walk the dog, though I find it rather too dull for Rusty and therefore for me. In the picture below you can see a canoe tied to the seawall, a conveyance for getting to the boats out in midstream.

Cow Key Channel is a convenient place to live as ou can see in the picture below, parking for your dinghy and your land transport:

The channel itself is well protected from the usual winds out of the southeast or i winter from northerly storms. The waters are pretty shallow and are usually pretty calm though the tides move a lot of waterand the currents can be fierce.

Which makes these kinds of gatherings either romantic holdouts or eyesores depending on your point of view. Consider too, as the county leaders do that these people have no sewage outlet except direct into the water. So now there are plans to create proper anchorages with facilities and fees to keep nearshore waters clean and sewage free especially now the county has been planting sewaers everywhere for homes ashore.

I have no strong feelings about these matters but many people do. I have done my share of living at anchor and in marinas and I am well aware of the pitfalls, the discipline necessary to keep your water tank full, your anchor secure and your boat tidy, a job at which most of these people fail signally. And so they attract unwanted attention.

The problem with living on a boat is that it is at best cheap housing bt its not a lifestyle that encourages sailing or movement of any kind. All the onboard detritus of daily living makes it hard to get a boat in motion if its motor even works or its sails are more than tatters. There again not everyone who lives on a boat knows how to drive one.

In a city desperate for cheap housing it sees counter intuitive to make life awkward or more expensive for these last ditch romantics from a previous era. For my part I'd rather not live for free on the water as it's a hard life and usually lonely - not too many women want to live in a bleach bottle bouncing on water with a toilet that causes you to reflect closely on what you've eaten and where it goes.

I find these waterborne neighborhoods depressing as the boats are deteriorating as much as fiberglass deteriorates and there is an air to me of apocalyptic gloom to these floating sheds. The interior is almost always white fiberglass with wires hanging and nuts and bolts visibly supporting the rigging. Air conditioning is hard to organize as you'd need a powerful generator so summers are sweltering in whatever breeze there may be while cool winters can be damp and confining especially further north.

After many years of living on a boat I figured marinas were too much like trailer parks and living at anchor was too inconvenient. I like the boat as home when traveling, not when earning a living.

If these craft do get orders from Monroe County to attach themselves to secure publicly provided moorings they will probably pay two to three hundred dollars  a month. The county will probably have to get a pump out boat, a floating honey wagon to empty toilet tanks and then also provide somewhere secure for the boaters to land their dinghies while they go to their jobs ashore. 

It all seems rather complicated but that's the discussion for the Boca Chica Channel just to the east of Cow Key CHannel. There are dozens of boats at anchor between Stock Island and Boca Chica. It's too easy to live on the hook (at anchor) in the Florida Keys.

And there is the undeniable charm of waterfront living:

A nice houseboat could give you a one bedroom apartment on the water:

A kayak to go ashore provides exercise be it ever so brief:

This chunk of seawall used to be called houseboat row (LINK) because there was a row of houseboats here. They were moved to Garrison Bight Marina in the city where they pay rent to be at a dock. They were two unsightly for the multi-million dollar condos that were built overlooking these waters:

But aside from the boaty stuff people enjoy the waterfront here:

And the sunsets aroud the corner at Smathers Beach: