Heres another story: In her book, Charlotte Niedhauk talked about the beach store on Elliott Island. She was referring to beach-combing and finding almost anything she and her husband, Russ, needed. They found lots of lumber, glass jars, wood boxes and specialized items such as Trinidad asphalt and caulking cotton to plug leaks in their skiff and paint for other projects. These were items that had been washed or thrown overboard from passing boats. They found numerous demijohns to use for storing water. I had never heard of a demijohn so I looked it up on the internet. They are large glass vessels with a narrow neck that can be corked. Growing up on Key Largo I too found all manner of things in the mangroves. Bottles and lumber of all kinds were common. I even once found something like a torpedo. I think it was a target that would be towed behind a military ship or something like that. We (the kids I was with) contacted the Coast Guard or someone who came and picked it up. After hurricane Donna in 1960 there was a lot of stuff to be found in mangroves. Some came from land (lumber, parts of houses) some came from boats and some were boats themselves. Billy Arnold and I found a bunch of boats from a boat rental near Tavernier after Donna. They were scattered about in the mangroves in the bay. Some were pretty beat up from crashing into the trees. We tied eight or ten of the rental boats together like a train and towed them to shore where we called the owner and asked if he wanted them back. Our deal was that he could have them back but we would keep one for ourselves. We kept the least damaged boat. It had a badly worn spot on the top plank on one side from rubbing on the trees. We replaced that board, put a coat of paint on it and had a pretty good boat to use. Billy already had an outboard motor and we made that our primary work boat for diving lobsters. We built a house from items scrounged from the shoreline. By we I mean me, Billy, Skipper Shaw, Billys brother, Ronnie, and a bunch of younger guys whose names I forget now. While exploring the coast of Radabob Key we found a large tree growing in the sand behind the line of mangroves. (Sand is actually rare on Key Largo but Radabob had a long narrow stretch of sand down its middle.) The big tree had a trunk that was probably three feet in diameter at the base and had large limbs up above the hurricanes high water mark, about eight feet above the ground. We sent scouting parties of two or three guys up and down the coast line and they would gather all lumber they could find, lash the boards together to make a raft, and then return with the rafts of building materials. We carried a few things from home: a saw, hammer, nails, and some tarpaper I think; jugs of water, canned beans or whatever food that would keep. One item that was found was a tremendous timber. It was probably fifteen or sixteen inches square and twenty feet long. This was just what we needed to support one side of our tree house. About eight or ten feet from the tree we dug a hole in the sand until we hit solid rock about three or four feet down. Then we stood the timber up in the hole so that it filled a vacant area in the tree limbs. We built a frame from the tree trunk to the timber and from the timber to a couple of the largest limbs. This frame became the floor for our tree house. The big timber was one corner of the house. When finished it was about 12 feet by 12 feet with one large room and a smaller room, a kitchen. The house had window openings with lean-to shutters. I dont remember screens but mosquitoes werent a big issue. We outfitted the house with bunk beds and installed a sink that drained into the mangroves. There was a depression in the seafloor right next to the mangroves near this big tree and the boat could be left there to float even at low tide. If we arrived when the water was low, or if we knew wed have to leave when the water was low, wed anchor offshore a little and wade in. For those times when we could leave the boat in the depression we built a small dock for the boat and then snaked a wood plank walkway through the mangrove roots, between the trees, gradually rising until it reached the door to the house. Except for jugs of fresh water, we didnt need a lot of foodstuff. Just offshore there was the remnant of a large boat that had burned to the waterline years before. Only the engine and part of the bottom of the boat remained. Lobsters were thick under this wreck. There was another much larger wreck a bit further north. It was made of concrete and sat in shallow water. It was another great place to find lobsters which we boiled in seawater in a tin tub over a fire on the sand. We also caught snappers and could cook them in a frying pan. Sometime after I had left for college a group of Cuban freedom fighters took over the tree house. They evidently conducted training on Radabob Key which included putting lots of bullet holes in the house. After the authorities caught them some of us went out to check on things. We found a 22 rifle (I dont know what happened to that) and we found a number of money bags from a bank in Miami. No, the bags didnt have money in them. There were dried beans in the money bags. I always thought it was strange to have dried beans in money bags. ***
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 18:09:44 +0000
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