SATURDAY FUN RUN WORDS BY STU JONES
B
y Saturday of the Key West Poker Run, most participants have had a couple days away from the boats, and they’re ready for some adventure. Two decades ago, that resulted in FPC exploring the waters of the Marqueses Keys, lying twenty miles west of Key West, where Mooney Bay offered a protected anchorage in paradise. But shallow waters and careless navigation left many boaters stranded there, with packed strainers, fried impellers and poor cell service to call Seatow for help. Plan B was the next course of action, and appropriately that led us to Boca Grande. This new playground offered a sandy beach, calm protected waters, no shoals to deal with, and it soon became the new “Paradise Found” for the Saturday Fun Run. The real bonus was, the location was half the distance of the Marqueses Keys, making it a hop-skip-and-jump for the weekend revelers seeking the sun and a little Saturday romp to get their adrenaline fix! The Boca Grande rendezvous started in about 1998, and lasted a good sixteen or more years until the party, which was
70 | POWERBOATING IN PARADISE
eventually crashed by everything-afloat, raised the eyebrows of sanctuary officials, who were concerned about the wellbeing of the birds and butterflies. Make no mistake about it. FPC was totally on board with the guidelines that were laid out by the sanctuary officials, and these guidelines were promoted clearly in the poker run kits and FPC magazine for all to see. Try as we might to keep the party on an even keel and appease the wildlife officials, the rowdy, beer drinking, musicplaying, pole-dancing mob was inevitably evacuated by the Refuge officials in 2015, and FPC was forced to find a new playground. This might sound like an easy task, but when high winds and choppy seas are prevalent as they frequently are in November, the ideal choices for a 100-boat raft up party soon become slim-pickins. In 2016, we settled for Plan C....Woman Key, but even this spot is exposed to the east and becomes quite choppy when the winds kick up.