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Fort Jefferson

The fort takes up an entire island. The bricks and lumber came from Pensacola, 500 miles away. The cement and stone came from New York, 1,500 miles away. The concrete foundation is 14 feet wide and a mile long, built Below Sea Level! You can walk the moat wall all the way around the fort. A moat to protect against attack and against the weather. Bastions from which they can protect the walls.

The fort was built for 400 cannons, and designed so 125 of them could simultaneously work the same target. No square corners.

A burrowing owl has adopted the fort, living in the remains of the main powder magazine. He’s in this picture.

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Fort Jefferson

Fort Jefferson is one of a chain of forts built for coastal protection in the mid-1800s. It protected access to the Gulf of Mexico.

Twenty foot thick walls. Sixteen million bricks. Three levels of cannons; 400 in all. Parapet. Bastions. A moat. A 50,000 pound 15 inch smoothbore that would launch a 300 pound shell three miles.

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Wednesday’s bird list

 

1 Brown Pelican 3
2 Double-crested Cormorant 12
3 Anhinga 2
4 Tricolored Heron 2
5 Cattle Egret 1
6 White Ibis 18
7 Osprey 3
8 Northern Harrier 1
10 Red-shouldered Hawk 1
11 Broad-winged Hawk 2
12 American Kestrel 8
13 Peregrine Falcon 1
14 Western Sandpiper 2
15 Laughing Gull 4
16 Royal Tern 11
17 Eurasian Collared-Dove 4
18 Mourning Dove 3
19 Common Nighthawk 1
20 Belted Kingfisher 2
21 Cliff Swallow 1
22 Blue-gray Gnatcatcher 2
23 Northern Mockingbird 2
24 Palm Warbler 9
25 Common Grackle 3

   

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Yesterday

Judy and me. We don’t do tours. We prefer to wander around on our own bumping into things. We wanted to go to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas though, and you can’t drive to Fort Jefferson. The road ends in Key West. Fort Jefferson is on a 16 acre island, Garden Key, 70 miles west of Key West, so we signed up for the boat trip.

It has been windy from the east for several days. Wind plus water equals waves. Our boat got to wallow in following seas on the way there. That was weird. It was a harder-edged trip back, pounding into the oncoming waves. The Key West end of the trip is sheltered by islands all the way out to the Marquesas Keys. It’s shallow and the swells are broken up into chop for that part of the trip. Outside of that, it’s a deep water crossing. Not huge seas; six feet, but a boat making 25 knots (mostly) and a wind blowing 20, made for a lot of unhappy people. I suppose it could have been worse. Only one person had to be taken away by ambulance on our arrival back to port in Key West. Some of us took Dramamine to minimize any motion sickness. Neither Judy nor I suffered any ill-effects from the trip.

The ride over and back was entertaining. It was like a Disneyland ride. Know the rule about moving around on boats? “One hand for yourself, one hand for the boat, at all times.” We got to practice negotiating our way around while holding on to the boat with two hands at all times. We got to ride on the bow while it was calm. Before it got rough we got to go into the wheelhouse and visit with the boat captain. Deb, the tour guide, was helpful in locating and identifying birds; we got two lifers on this trip. The Brown Boobies were perched on navigational markers around the island. When it was time to start back, Deb got the captain to swing the boat out around one of the nearby sand islands, Hospital Key, so we could get the masked boobies. We didn’t get pictures of either bird, but we got good looks at each.

We didn’t really drive the motorhome out into the Gulf of Mexico, but we couldn’t resist putting one more pin in the map for Fort Jefferson:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107013362562471418011.00046ff7cac9ae98ff560&ll=40.313043,-107.314453&spn=30.104187,78.662109&z=4