Local Stories in Florida
3 places
History·Monroe County
Bud N' Mary's Marina
Casting a fly to bonefish and tarpon in water barely deep enough to float a skiff was worked out on the flats around Islamorada, and this marina is where much of it was refined and passed on. The founding catch came first and belongs to someone else: in 1939 a guide named Bill Smith took the first bonefish ever deliberately caught on a fly, in Little Basin on the bay side of Islamorada, using a pattern he had tied himself.
History·Monroe County
Hurricane Monument
Hundreds of World War I veterans were living in federal relief camps on Lower Matecumbe and Windley Key on Labor Day, 1935, working on the road that would become US 1, when the most intense hurricane ever recorded to strike the United States came ashore on top of them. Sustained winds reached 185 miles an hour, and a barometer at Craig Key read 26.35 inches, still the lowest pressure ever recorded at a hurricane landfall in this country.
History·Monroe County
Key West's Wreckers
Key West grew rich in the middle of the nineteenth century without farming or manufacturing anything at all. The money came from wrecking, the licensed business of salvaging ships that struck the coral reef a few miles offshore, in a strait that funnelled almost every vessel moving between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic seaboard past a shallow barrier with very little safe water through it.