Water You Drink With Your Eyes

A week in The Dry Tortugas

One of the many benefits of living on a small sailboat is that we get to visit places few people get to go. The Dry Tortugas is one of these places. Although fifty thousand people visit each year, most only get to stay for a few hours. We stay for eight days.

We sail overnight from Boca Grande Pass, outside of Punta Gorda, Florida and arrive just before sunset.

In 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon caught a hundred and sixty sea turtles here to feed his hungry crew and named the place Tortugas (turtles in Spanish). Later, the name “Dry” was added because there is no reliable source of fresh water in these islands. They are the driest place in Florida, with an annual rainfall of just thirty-six inches. I haven’t seen the entire state of Florida, but I’ve seen quite a bit and so far, The Dry Tortugas are the most beautiful.

The United States purchased all of Florida from Spain for a cool five million dollars in 1822. Three years later, work began on a lighthouse on the largest island, now called Garden Key.

Just seventy miles from both Key West (the westernmost key containing a useable supply of fresh water) and the Cuban coast, the area of The Dry Tortugas has always been strategically important for shipping in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1846, construction began on Garden Key to build a massive fort, named after our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Hundreds of workers and slaves were employed to build the fort and an extensive and innovative system of cisterns was incorporated into the walls of the fort to catch rain to provide fresh water for all these people.

Unfortunately, sand was used for filtering and the salt in the sand contaminated the water, so much of it was only fit for washing. Instead, two massive steam condensers produced seven thousand gallons of fresh water per day for drinking.

Fort Jefferson was only half finished at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860.

Five years later, Dr. Samuel Mudd was imprisoned there, after being convicted of conspiracy in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Mudd allegedly set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth after he was injured when he leaped from the box seats to the stage while making his getaway.

In 1867, an epidemic of yellow fever broke out at Fort Jefferson. In an effort to contain the outbreak, victims were removed to a small island northeast of Garden Key along with all the medical personnel.

The cause of the disease, now known to be spread by mosquitoes, was unknown at the time and there wasn’t much in the way of treatment. Gradually, the patients succumbed and in turn, so did the medical staff. In desperation, Dr. Mudd was removed from his prison cell and shipped out to the hospital island, where he worked tirelessly to document the illness in an effort to determine the cause and possible treatments. As a result of his heroic work in the epidemic, Dr. Mudd received a presidential pardon in 1869 and was released. He returned to his home in Maryland where he lived out the remainder of his life, but was never able to clear his name. He died of pneumonia in 1883 at the age of forty-nine.

The yellow fever epidemic, along with frequent hurricanes, convinced the War Department to abandon the fort in 1874, leaving behind a few caretakers. Construction was never fully completed. The 243 cannons in the fort were never fired. Fort Jefferson, the largest brick masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere, containing some sixteen million bricks, was left to wind and sky.

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave it the official designation of “Fort Jefferson National Monument.” It was re-designated “Dry Tortugas National Park” by congress in 1992. Ernest Hemingway’s 1932 short story “After the Storm” is about a shipwreck between Garden Key and Rebecca Shoal, which lies just east of the islands. In 1907, the 261-foot, three-masted, iron-hulled, sailing ship Avanti sank off Loggerhead Key, just west of Garden Key. The wreck, now known as the “Windjammer Wreck,” is a popular spot for snorkeling and diving as it lies in just twenty feet of water. There are dozens of wrecks scattered about the islands.

We didn’t get to the Windjammer wreck, but we sailed over to Loggerhead Key to snorkel on the backside. The park service no longer allows anchoring there because of damage to the coral, but they maintain one mooring ball for visitors. We’d planned to spend the day, but the mooring ball is first-come, first served, with a two-hour limit. Unfortunately for us, another boat came and we had to leave after just two hours.

During our very quick snorkel, we saw some big barracudas, boulder-sized brain coral, purple sea fans, blue fish, yellow fish, striped fish and fish with spots.

The remaining seven small islands comprising The Dry Tortugas (there used to be more, but they were washed away by storms) are home to more than three hundred species of sea birds, including magnificent frigatebirds, sooty terns, brown noddys and masked boobys.

When we first arrived in early February, Bush Key, the island now attached to Garden Key thanks to a hurricane, was still open, pending the arrival of nesting sooty terns. We were able to walk on the beautiful pristine beach there for nearly a week until the park service closed the beach to prevent disturbance of the nesting colony.

Each day it seemed like the flock of terns, which was already massive when we arrived, doubled in size. By the time we departed after eight days, the sound of thousands of wheeling terns was overwhelming.

Some of our fellow boaters kayaked out past Bush Key to Long Key beyond and saw what looked like red Christmas tree balls hanging in the trees. With binoculars they were able to see it was the male magnificent frigatebirds with their red throat pouches blown up to attract the ladies. These birds have the largest wingspan (six feet) to body weight (less than four pounds) ratio of any bird and live most of their lives on the wing. Because of their huge wingspan, they are unable to take flight from the ground.

We spent our days poking around the fort and strolling on the beach at Bush Key until they closed it. The weather was perfect, seventy-five to eighty degrees, with ample sunshine and just a few showers.

Every day at 10:30, about two hundred people got off the ferry and disappeared into the fort or into the water to snorkel. At three, they were gone and we had the place to ourselves again. We got to know some of the park rangers, as they went about their various duties. One of them kept his little catamaran on the beach and zipped around the anchorage on breezy evenings. He told us he took this tiny boat all the way (seventy miles) to Cuba and back.

There was something magical to me in the visual juxtaposition of the manmade fort and the wildness of nature all around it. The play of light around the bricks and the sheer magnitude of the structure were endlessly fascinating.

So many openings, each with its own particular view beyond.

I felt like I wanted to move in and never, ever leave.

But, after a few days, I began to get annoyed with the all-day coming and going of the float planes. The noise was earsplitting after the gentle peace of the sea and light breezes. With the beach now closed because of the nesting birds, there was limited area for walking and the sound of so many birds shrieking all day started to wear on the nerves. Even the fort began to get too familiar. So many pictures of bricks.

It would be a long, upwind sail back to the rest of The Keys and we were running low on water. It was time to go. With a forecast for a favorable west wind, we set sail early one morning. We saw no other boats all day. Fort Jefferson slipped over the horizon and left us with images and experiences we would not soon forget. We felt very lucky to have been to see it.

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