Day 48: At Islamorada

Took Rosie to see if there were some Manatee hanging around a particular marina (nope) so continued on to Theatre of the Sea. Not bad, but seemed a bit like a 'poor man's' SeaWorld (Queensland Gold Coast). This attraction was built in an old quarry from which the builders of the Flagler railroad to Key West extracted rock. In a landscaped area, they've created a series of interconnected ponds into which--at one end-- they pump 2,000 gal of seawater each day. This filters through the ponds over a period of 6 days and returns to the ocean through the ground.

Cooked on the BBQ again, with a salad. Walked out along the 387-ft length of the apartment complex jetty to watch the nightime launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending 29 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Well, we couldn't see the actual lift-off from down in the Keys, but from our jetty, we saw the fiery exhaust of the ascending rocket, albeit faintly, until it went through a cloud layer and, keeping track courtesy of the live commentary on our phones, we were also able to discern the faint glow of the booster, once separated, completing its arc through the night sky and falling out of sight in the far distance to seaward. Following stage separation, the first stage landed on a droneship, stationed out in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Bahamas, and the livestream included live vision of the booster rocket landing back on the droneship. This was the 23rd flight for this particular first stage booster.Read more