We traveled almost 25 miles along the length of Key Largo, and pulled in twice to explore the coastline. The first stop resulted from a misunderstanding: the Harbormaster holding that night's reservation for our Monterey bowriders slip had instructed me to "turn in at the channel marked with a Red 2". Our crew spotted the marker, so I turned the boat and started in. I had two good reasons to be eager: it had been pretty choppy on the Atlantic, and I was hyped to see Key Largo up close. The entrance route had a long entrance channel, and after that, what seemed like an endless passage to the improved harbor area tucked inside. We'd skipped lunch and were hungry. Dinner plans occupied most of our discussion. And then, after close to 30 minutes of ingress, we discovered it was not our harbor after all! <br /> <br />We then realized that our Red 2 was not the correct Red 2. After several cell call attempts we re-connected with the Harbormaster and confirmed what we'd suspected: there was another Red 2 farther south. So right back out the long channel we went. It was pretty straightforward until--as Parrrott_Head phrased it--we "got surfed right out of the channel" by a commercial fishing boat that was heading in. Expletives deleted! Please God, don't let me damage my new Bravo III props with only X hours on it! For a few minutes I wondered if there was an unpleasant pattern forming here, based on our "luck" the past hour. Was this--our "baptism" cruise with the Admiral aboard--going to turn into the cruise from hell? <br /> <br />We counter-balanced our frustration by appreciating the tropical scenery we'd had a chance to observe as we crept along that long channel in both directions. The Mangrove Estuary had us wide-eyed: Encroaching trees lining each side of the channel, with their roots coming up from under water. We definitely knew we were in the FL keys now. We also spotted birds and fish in all directions as we idled in. How lucky we were to be boating in the Keys! <br /> <br />The Key Largo Post office was called Rock Harbor until the early 1950s, when the residents re-named it after the popular John Houston film that starred Bogie and Bacall. That film was shot mostly in Hollywood, but was such a box-office success that the Keys decided to capitalize on the name to attract tourists. To this day, Key Largo is the unofficial name of the community on this island: it is not a municipality, but an unincorporated part of the county.<br /> <br />After Key West--at the opposite end of the multi-island string of populated keys--Largo is the second-most populated in this archipelago of 1700 islands. Key Largo (and the ocean water that we were traversing) is also home to the Camp Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. It was the first U.S. undersea park, and features about 78 square miles of living coral and hundreds of varieties of marine life. <br /><br />By now, it was time to get Seabuddys Monterey bowrider into a slip. The day was ending and we needed to search out a dining experience to match up to the caliber of the cruise down.<br /><br />Part three to come
