The Glass-Bottomed Boat

We were up at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, January 18th, another beautiful day. I ran over to Chad's to pick up some bagels and cream cheese, then we said goodbye to Island Bay Resort and drove northeast 10 miles to John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park (Mile Marker 102.5, oceanside) in Key Largo. The day before, we had made a reservation for the 9:15 a.m. glass-bottomed boat trip, but had been told that the reservation would expire if we weren't there when the park opened at 8 a.m. to buy our tickets. As it turned out, we wouldn't have needed the reservations, because there were less than 20 people on a boat that could hold 130, but we didn't want to take the chance. We had asked the owners at Island Bay if there was any real difference between the tour from the park and one that started at the Holiday Inn. They said no, other than that you would have to pay to get into the park, but the park had other interesting things to see and do and the trip from there was a little cheaper.

We got our tickets, went out to have coffee and a scone at Starbuck's, then returned and got in line to board the Spirit of Pennekamp, a 65-foot motor catamaran. The older couple ahead of us in line were, it turned out, from near Madison, Wisconsin and they knew Mary Joy's hometown of Monroe very well.

We sat up on the top rear deck, and the boat set off down a long and winding creek through the mangroves. A mangrove is a sort of shrub with a visible, aboveground network of roots that

anchors it in swampy soil or even the water itself. There are three kinds of mangrove: red, black and white. The red mangrove is very tolerant of salt water and pulls all the salt out of the water, concentrating it in a few of its leaves, which then turn yellow and fall off. The root systems, besides accumulating sand and mud and gradually building land, are an important place for small fish to hide from predators.

After maybe 20 minutes, we got out of the creek, then, for another 10 or 15 minutes

we had to work our way along a narrow, dredged channel. Black, long-necked cormorants were standing in groups on posts and channel markers, drying their spread wings in the sunshine. Finally, we got into the open ocean and headed at full speed (21 m.p.h.) for the tower marking Molasses Reef, arriving among the other boats there around 10 a.m.

We were then called downstairs to lower ourselves, feet hanging over the edge, into sitting position above the two window wells, one in each hull of the catamaran. One man lost his American flag baseball cap into the window well, where it sat until one of the crew members went down to get it on the way back. Below us passed the reef (legend says it was named after the wreck of a ship from Jamaica that carried a cargo of molasses). We saw elkhorn coral and fan coral, barracuda, parrotfish, sergeant majors, and even a stingray on the bottom, half-covered with sand, its sting sticking up. It was fun, though we had the feeling that the people around the other window well were seeing more and better stuff. But they may have had the same feeling about us. After about an hour, we started for shore, arriving around 11:40.

We then walked the three short trails in the park. The strangest trees we saw were the poisonwood, a relative of poison ivy, and the gumbo limbo. You don't want to touch a poisonwood, or even shelter under it while rain drops off of its leaves onto you. The gumbo limbo has a translucent reddish-brown bark that makes it look like it's covered with shaggy root-beer candy. One of the trails was a boardwalk through a mangrove swamp.

After visiting the nice but small aquarium, we went to have lunch at the Fish House. Again, fish Matecumbe and key-lime pie. Again, very good.

So, now it was time to bid farewell to the Keys and head for the Treasure Coast, in particular Jensen Beach, about fifty miles north of Palm Beach. It took us about 3 1/2 hours, driving the Florida Turnpike to highway 714, near Stuart, which we took to A1A. We crossed the bridge over the wide, estuarial St. Lucie River to Sewall's Point, then turned left, before the bridge to Hutchinson Island. Around 5:30 we arrived at the Inn at Tilton Place, a nice bed and breakfast, where we had stayed two or three years ago.

The Inn is a block north of the main intersection in Jensen Beach, a small resort town on the Indian River.

We went to dinner at the Prawnbroker, in Sewall's Point. Not bad, but nothing memorable.