The Florida Keys

A few months ago I was able to spend a few fun days in Islamorada and Key West with some friends. This is going to sound really sad but I have lived in south Florida now for, mmm, 6 years and this was the first time I had been out on the ocean here (not counting a cruise). I’m not kidding. I have been to the beach and swimming in the ocean plenty of times, but not actually in a boat out in the middle of it. It was so much fun and such a different experience! I am afraid of fish and I certainly don’t eat them. I am that girl who you see running past the seafood section in the grocery store because it stinks and I don’t even want to look at it.  So being out in the middle of the water in a small boat made me a bit nervous at first. My friends kept catching baby sharks on their lines, they were everywhere! In the back of my mind I was waiting for the Jaws movie theme music to start playing. But I did something that I thought I would never do…..I touched one! Sounds pathetic, I know. But this was a huge step for me. As a kid, my friend, Beth, and I would sit at the end of her dock along the lake I grew up on and go fishing. It was fun, except I wouldn’t touch the fish we would catch. Thank goodness she didn’t mind taking it off the end of the line and throwing it back for me. Gives me the heebee-geebees thinking about having to touch those fish.

When I took these photos I had just gotten my camera less than two month prior and was still trying to figure out all the news buttons on the complex camera body.  And I don’t know what I was thinking but I took it out onto a sandbar we parked the boat at. Thank goodness it didn’t fall in the ocean…..