Luckily for us, the Bahia Honda State Park has a wonderful public beach, as one of the problems with trying to sail in the ‘more pristine’ parts of the Florida Keys is that all the water access is privately owned land. Maybe I’ve watched a little too much Law & Order, but after the first group of locals yelled at us for trespassing when we tried to scout a launch location from their private jetty, we thought we should err on the side of caution just in case they had guns in their garages!
Arriving at the public beach, which we were able to rig and sail out from, is a decent-sized bay in between the Railway Bridge on one side and the concrete behemoth that is the US-1 Highway. Although it was an horrifically gusty 10-25 knots out on the water and all we’d brought to Miami were 9.5m sails, Kurosh and I had a great session, much to the amusement of the locals sun tanning at the beach that day. Carter had made his way to the very top of the bridge and so we made our first attempt at trying to sail under.