Dry Tortugas: Florida's beginning and end
By Tim Dorsey/Tampa Tribune

Tips for the trip

The Dry Tortugas isn't the kind of place people end up by accident. It's not like driving along U.S. 19 and impulsively pulling over at the taxidermy museum or chimp farm.

Located another 70 miles west of Key West, the Tortugas are the beginning and the end of Florida. They are the state's answer to the top of Mount Everest, the bottom of Death Valley and last call at Pat O'Brien's.

The cluster of seven small, coral islands sits lost in the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico, in the middle of nowhere and halfway to nowhere else. The 360-degree panorama of sky and sea offers expansive beauty and relentless exposure to the elements.

The circumstances of the Tortugas are equally extreme. Since the 16th century, finding yourself in these waters has meant either tremendously good fortune or the kind of bad luck usually seen only in Greek plays.

Prisoners have been banished to the islands, gone crazy and tried to swim 150 miles to the Everglades. Soldiers were assigned arduous duty here and fell like bowling pins to yellow fever. Hapless mariners disappeared in unnamed hurricanes. Even the doomed USS Maine set sail from the Tortugas for Havana, where it was blown up to start the Spanish-American War.

Others, however, have viewed the islands as the end of the rainbow, where they reaped a bounty of fish, turtles, tern eggs and shrimp. And in the waters to the east, Mel Fisher discovered the treasure of the sunken galleon Atocha.

Today, under the operation of the National Park Service, the islands' rewards are aesthetic, and the lucky are those dedicated enough to make the trip by private boat or chartered seaplane. The utter isolation of the Tortugas has produced their greatest allure: unspoiled natural resources. The isles and their coral reefs are so idyllic that marine biologists use them as a ``baseline model'' to measure human impact in other regions. And, in case your mind isn't blown enough, there's ``The Fort.'' For a world-record non sequitur, the U.S. military went to one of the most inaccessible spots in the hemisphere to build the nation's largest masonry structure, 19th-century Fort Jefferson.
The idea was to control Gulf shipping lanes, and the result was 16 million bricks of thick-headedness as out of place as finding Trump Tower in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp.

Even stranger, it's breathtaking.

You've been sailing half a day or maybe flying over endless stretches of ocean, and suddenly, on the horizon, this man-made thing the size of a shopping mall appears to rise on its own out of the sea - with a moat.

Key West Seaplane Service offers a spectacular, low-altitude flight to the Dry Tortugas (named for the lack of fresh water and the Spanish word for turtles) that skirts the Marquesas atoll and skims above shipwrecks, dolphin pods, sharks and sea turtles.

After a 45-minute trip, our plane circled the fort for photograph-taking and its landing approach, finally splashing down and taxiing to the beach on Garden Key.

My wife and I walked down the plane's pontoons to the sand, grabbed the camping gear, and claimed our tent site under two coconut palms next to the moat wall.

Once everything was set up, we headed across the moat bridge that led inside the fort.

The visitor's center explains - with videos, photos and pamphlets - the improbable history of Fort Jefferson. The one-breath version:
Construction began in the 1840s, but improved naval cannons soon made its fortified walls obsolete, and it was turned into a prison.

Its most famous inmate was Samuel Mudd, the physician who set the broken leg of President Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Mudd was pardoned after helping fight a yellow fever epidemic. After 20 years of construction, the fort was left unfinished in the 1860s. It was used as a coaling station for ships near the turn of the century and then abandoned.

Our self-guided tour began in the first floor's prison quarters. We stood in Mudd's dark, dank cell, peering through a tiny window at the emerald, turquoise and ultramarine light outside - and wondering what effect it must have had on the human spirit.

That dichotomy is emphasized in literature on the fort, which describes the free-falling despair of those imprisoned. At the same time, one prisoner wrote, ``It is pleasant to go to the top of the fort on a calm, clear day and take a view of the surrounding scenery. Away in the distance the reefs are bordered by the dark-blue ocean... as the water decreases in depth it changes to an azure blue.''

Spiral staircases of stone took us up to the fort's second floor, where - unlike the prison cells below - entire walls of bricks had collapsed, creating giant windows to the sea.

The added light also revealed the scale and craftsmanship of the brick archways.

Continuing upward, the staircase brought us into the old lighthouse. We exited onto the fort's roof and a view of water on all horizons.

After a walk around the rim of the roof, we left the fort and our tour of history, ready to begin a different tour.

With the 20th century came a dramatic shift in the use of the Tortugas, from home of the largest military fort in the United States to one of the most fertile wildlife observation sites.

The January 1927 issue of National Geographic contains the world's first published underwater color photographs, documenting life on the Tortugas' coral reefs.

The Geographic Society again visited the Tortugas for a 1947 issue, this time focusing on the ``blizzard'' of terns nesting on Bush Key, just across the channel from the fort. For hundreds of years, the birds have been guided by their internal navigation system from the Carolinas to the same tiny nesting area in the middle of the Gulf. (Neighboring Bird Key, the terns' original nesting island in the Tortugas, was submerged by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.)
Our second tour began in snorkel gear at the south beach, where we set out on a 150-yard swim to the coral reef. A large barracuda now resides at the southwest corner of the moat wall, and Mr. Curious followed us around until we were out of his neigborhood.

We crossed over seagrass beds and an ancient ship's encrusted anchor, and were soon hovering atop one of the reefs. A school of thousands of small fish engulfed us as larger angel, parrot and trigger fish darted from under coral heads. On our return swim, two giant rays slowly passed to the right.

After drying off on the beach, it was time to explore the island's showcase feature. Designed to prevent a close-in naval attack, the moat wall now acts as the ultimate barrier reef, nurturing a thriving ecosystem - and providing front-row seats.

The 3/5-mile stroll atop the structure features views of pulsating jellyfish, sea squirts and cucumbers, starfish, lobster, and even an occasional nurse shark that finds its way through a break in the bricks.

We sat down on the west wall, where just about everyone from the camping area had gathered, and applauded the sunset. Then, almost ritualistically, we returned to start our campfires and grill steaks or fish caught from the pier.

After dinner, we decided to pull our sleeping bags from the tent and unrolled them under a dome of so many stars it seemed artificial.

Just before midnight a light rain awoke us. A wind suddenly kicked up. We picked up our sleeping bags and the wind blew even harder. Lightning laced the sky, and the wind kept on picking up.

Then everything went insane. Forty-foot boats came unanchored and started to go sideways across the harbor. All kinds of emergency air horns went off. Palm trees bent to unnatural angles, and flimsy tent canopies blew inside-out like umbrellas.

But there was no real sense of danger. It was like watching some fantastic weather show from the safety of an aircraft carrier. There was a detached sense of awe and entertainment. Unless you had a $250,000 boat blowing around the harbor like a bathtub toy. Then you were jumping around screaming a lot.

A half hour later, as quickly as it had started, it ended.

``What was that?'' we asked a bored-looking park ranger. ``Oh, just a typical Tortugas storm blowing through.''

We ate breakfast at sunrise as rangers jogged and rode bicycles around the moat wall. Morning also brought a small boatload of wildcat shrimpers to the pier, where several yachts sent dinghies ashore to trade bottles of rum and cases of beer for huge bags of shrimp.

As we packed up camp and prepared to head for the seaplane, something toward the beach caught our eye.

In the finely ground coral sand was a set of flipper tracks. A sea turtle had come ashore as we slept, looking for a place to nest a few yards from our tent.

TIPS FOR THE TRIP
HOW TO GET THERE

CAMPING WHAT TO BRING SNORKELING AND FISHING