Our daughter, Ann, is visiting from Chicago on her way to a scuba trip elsewhere. She has a 3 day stopover in Miami an she rented a car to come down to the Keys for a visit while we're in Marathon.
We went to Bahia Honda Key beach to get seashells to put in the base of a candle vase she gave us for the aft deck table. It was high tide so not many shells on the beach where we went.
Manatee! When we got back to the boat from the beach, there was a manatee near the docks. In the picture, it’s laying on it’s back with it’s mouth up in the air trying to catch water dripping from a hose that somebody had left on the dock. The manatee came up to drink the water, but when the people on the dock saw that, they turned the water off because it’s supposed to be bad for the manatees. I’d say it was about 7 or 8 feet long and absolutely huge in girth, like the size of a big grey cow in the water.

We’re doing a kind of “eco tour” tomorrow, where a naturalist (ex Everglades park ranger) takes us in a small boat tour through the mangroves and to some little islands on the gulf side.