Florida Keys out of season

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My expectations of Bahia Honda were a little confused. I knew from our guidebook and the guy on the plane that the beach wasn’t exactly huge but, according to the in-flight magazine, it was rated amongst Conde Nast’s best US beaches.

Arriving at Bahia Honda the beach itself was easily overlooked, as your eye is drawn to the remains of the old road bridge. You can’t help but head up the severed bridge from where you have a great view of the turquoise waters, and the feat of civil engineering of Highway 1 linking together what appear to be little more than sand bars. In spite of the lack of creature comforts – this is just a road and a bridge that stops dead – it is mesmerising to sit as if on a high board watching the wheeling pelicans in the warm sea breeze.

Only as you turn to walk back down the road to ground level do you see from this vantage point what a jewel Bahia Honda is. Even on a slightly overcast day this narrow strip of land sparkled, a lush core of greenery surrounded by a skirt of bleached white sand set in a turquoise/jade sea.

Not being a beach babe, nor it being quite the season for it, the view of the beach was as good as it got for us. We walked down the seaward beach, a slender strip of sand narrowing to 2m in places, but found the going hard in a bank of prickly storm-tossed seaweed seemingly full of rotting fish. Where we could escape the smell, we were tormented by sand flies. With little to do but keep moving, we exhausted Bahia Honda’s charms within a couple of hours. I appreciate my description of the beach itself is not a particularly enticing scene, but on balance I would rather have seen this deserted out of season ‘real’ beach, than a groomed ‘artificial’ beach lined with beached sunbathers.

We got quite excited arriving at the park, looking forward to some walking. Unfortunately the park seemed predominately to focus on glass bottomed boat trips - fair enough with hindsight I suppose as the name of the park is ‘Coral Reef Park’. For those, like us, who wanted to experience nature without the aid of a motor there seemed to be few options.

We did explore the couple of small beach areas, taking more than a couple of minutes each. And we also investigated the couple of signed boardwalks in the mangroves, but these proved disappointly short. In fact, in this first park of our 2 week visit to Florida’s National Parks, we began to realise that most signed walks tend to be for the disabled just to give a flavour of the area. That, and possibly because there really isn’t far to walk in the Keys.

From the longer of the two boardwalks we saw some people canoeing through crystal clear channels in the mangroves, and realised this was the activity for us – gliding peacefully along with the fish and birds and away from the noise of radios and boats. We were thrilled to find there is a 4 hour canoe trail, however, on the Sunday of Thanksgiving, we couldn’t rent a canoe for a few hours which would not give us enough time to get down to Key West in daylight.

We came across Long Key State Recreation Area, guided by our Florida Lonely Planet, which duly rented out kayaks for the remarkably cheap rate of $4 an hour for the 2 hour self guided circuit through a tidal lagoon. And the late middle aged couple manning the entry gate seemed thrilled to see us!

The kayak trail was certainly not demanding, but it was a peaceful paddle from numbered marker bouy to numbered marker buoy. At each buoy the information sheet pointed out some interesting fact about the plants or the wildlife. We had a lovely peaceful (apart from the sights and sounds of the highway on regular occasions) couple of hours amongst the wading birds in the late afternoon sun.