Friday 16th Oct: Big Pine Key

Big Pine Key is about 2/3 of the way down the 100 mile Keys island chain. Our campsite is directly on the bay and caters for boaters so it has its own quay and a separate small harbour. This is the quay; the campsite stretches off to the right. Well bring our inflatable plastic dinghy next time.

It’s the low season until the end of this month; on 1^st November, we are told, the site fills up completely almost overnight. Still, right now we get the choice of an excellent pitch overlooking the bay. Doing a holiday blog, it’s tempting to always use photos bathed in sunshine, but the view from our pitch looks more dramatic with the dark clouds. Jane’s taking her tea out- abroad we may be, but we’re British and can’t function without tea.

Big Pine Key is a national sanctuary for the only remaining population of Key deer, a small species that seems to have made a remarkable comeback going by the numbers that we saw. This is a stag crossing a side road. 

There aren’t many beaches in the Keys, and most of those are artificial. Our nearest local beach is called Long Beach. We set off in anticipation, imagining a beach a mile long with a hundred yards width of sand. A little deflated when we arrive at a beach a couple of hundred yards long and five feet wide; that is, depending on the tide; tide in = zero feet wide. Still, it takes a pleasant enough photo, particularly as I haven’t stripped off for a skinnydip.

People will dump stuff anywhere, we thought as we came across this plastic helmet.

How wrong can you be! It’s a horseshoe crab, evident when we turned it over; deceased of course.

The campsite nature trail reveals some interesting features: this gumbo limbo tree for instance. With its peeling bark, it’s also known as the “tourist tree” as it looks like a holidaymaker’s skin who’s been sunbathing too long.

The area is full of birdlife, with its shallow ponds and abundance of vegetation and fish. This next photo contains white ibis, great egret, reddish egret and snowy egret.

Much of the rock around is coral from past eras when sea levels were much higher. This is an example of two types (two photos joined together); the left hand one is called brain coral because it looks like a brain. So it’s a good place to come for a top-up when your brain starts wearing out: that’s the reason we’re here.