This summer I went to the Florida Keys. We took a plane to Fort Lauderdale; that took about 3 hours. Then we rented a car and drove 4 hours to Key Marathon to my aunt's vacation house that she was giving us for 5 days. It was right on the water of the Gulf of Mexico and itr had a dock that went out about 100 yards into the water. It also had a swimming pool. The ocean was prefectly still with no waves, and crystal clear. It was really warm too, about 85 degrees every day.
At the end of the dock there would always be dozens of big fish swimming around, like 30+ inches. So you could imagine the area is an awesome place to fish. There was alot of barracuda, nurse sharks, tarpon (they can get huge, like 7+ feet) rays, angelfish, king mackeral and other things. It was a missed opprotunity though, because I just started fishing alot after we left and I didn't really know anything about it while we were there. Me and my mom even saw manatees. It was nighttime and we were on the dock and one made a really big splash. There were 4 of them and they were really big. They swam by the dock two times and then left.
We even went snorkeling off the dock and saw all those things. Later we went snorkeling in the open water above a coral reef. It was really cool. There was thousands of fish every color you could imagine. There was big schools of hundreds of fish, and they were pretty good sized. There was alot of scorpion fish; they are weird looking things... they are brown and tan with spines all over their fins. I saw a few really big barracuda as well... One that was 5 and a half feet swam by me; that was pretty scary. Cudas that big have teeth that are that big have teeth that are half an inch and 3 quarters of an inch big. I also saw one under the boat that was about 3 and a half feet.
That was probably the most fun in the trip but we did other stuff too... We took a tour of Key West on one of those train things so that was pretty cool. We went into where Ernest Hemingway the writer used to live as well. Overall is was alot of fun and it's a really beatiful place so I hope I can go back sometime.
