- Local News for Southern Sailors - December 2002 Next Story
THE KEYS
Boot Key Harbor Getting Cleaner
By Morgan Stinemetz
MARATHON, FL—Boot Key Harbor, one of the prettiest and safest anchorages in all of the Florida Keys was, when I stopped by two years ago this month, a mess. The water was polluted. Derelict, sunken boats littered the bottom like hot dog wrappers after a baseball game. Maybe worse, no one seemed able to straighten out the snafu.
There were so many interconnected bureaucracies that all had some kind of jurisdiction over the waters of Boot Key Harbor that everyone was strangling in red tape and nothing was getting done. Some of the "squatters," people who lived aboard and pumped their effluent into the water, were indignant about the possibility of having any governmental authority attempt to tell them what to do. Those squatters were not stupid, though. None of them had the temerity to swim in the waters in which they anchored and which they claimed as their own. They knew what lurked there. Disease.
On Wednesday, I talked to the dockmaster at City Marina, Marathon. His name is Dave McCarthy, and he had some encouraging news. The City of Marathon, which has ample resources, runs the marina. The facility is actually a huge, old concrete fish house, so its interior is vast. With the loading dock doors open on both sides of the building and a breeze blowing, there is no need for air-conditioning. McCarthy has an office at the south end of the building.
There is a deep cut-in from Boot Key Harbor, and it is about 60 feet wide. Transients may tie up along the marina's west wall, port side to. McCarthy said that the wall could accommodate 10-12 boats, depending on size. In the summer, if one is in the lee of the building, there is shade from that building all afternoon.
City Marina, Marathon, is not as fancy as some. It also costs less. And were it not for this nascent effort via the marina, Boot Key Harbor would be heading even farther down a slippery slope.
McCarthy said that a law enforcement approach to getting the waters of the harbor was tossed in favor of an educational approach. To get a bust on a polluter, he indicated, was as complex as rush hour when tourists are choking Florida's roads. The ability of law enforcement agencies to do their job had been cut so fine as to be impossible.
This is a slight exaggeration, but it went something like this. If a law enforcement officer witnessed some fecal material being discharged from a vessel, he would have to "capture" that specimen and then get a specimen from the people on the boat to find out who was actually the guilty party. It is hard to imagine a law enforcement officer, a guy trained to hunt down crooks, killers and other miscreants, stooping, so to speak, to picking up poop out of the water.
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Now, City Marina, Marathon, has a pump-out vessel that regularly services vessels in the harbor. It is working well. There is another pump-out boat on the way. An attempt to get private initiative to take care of the pump-outs from anchored vessels failed when the owner of the boat, colorfully named "The Turd Tug," was himself caught pumping out his own vessel's tank into the ocean. That was like adding insult to injury.
Bruce Popham, the president of an upscale boat yard on Boot Key Harbor—Marathon Boat Yard—said that he believes that the water in Boot Key Harbor is, indeed, cleaner.
Popham also said that two sweeps of the bottom of Boot Key Harbor have brought up the wrecks of 163 boats that had settled to the bottom there. I have it on good authority that there were people in Marathon who would, for a fee, get rid of your unwanted and valueless boat for you by anchoring it in Boot Key Harbor until it sank. There may still be a few down there. No one really knows. But there are 163 fewer of them than were down there when I last passed this way two years ago.
That's a big step in the right direction.
McCarthy also said that Marathon has instituted a quick scan system to make sure that decrepit, old boats don't get towed in there and left. If a new boat shows up in the harbor and looks as if it might be unseaworthy, the authorities will come to check it out. Computers make looking up information on that boat a lead pipe cinch, McCarthy said.
Boot Key Harbor has always been an attractive stopover for cruisers. Maybe one day in the future it will also be attractive enough to swim in.
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