Goodbye Hurricane Season!
So long, Irma. Goodbye Hurricane Harvey. Been nice knowing you. (Well, not really.) But you both will be remembered. The Florida Keys and southwest Texas were hammered and flooded. But hotels, motels, cottages, campgrounds, bed and breakfasts, marinas, charter captains, sightseeing cruises, and other businesses say they are ready to welcome snowbirds again. Right on cue, the press reported that “Rayburn House,” seen in the Bloodline series and centered in the Florida Keys, is booking guests again for dates starting January 18th. The resort’s actual name is The Moorings Village and Spa.
The Keys have launched an upbeat, all-is-good ad campaign, saluting the hard work of everybody making repairs to be ready for the tourist season. “These residents are resilient and have worked hard at getting back to normal. The show goes on and so do the residents of the Keys,” said John Underwood, chief marketing officer for Tinsley Advertising in Miami. By mid-November more than 70 percent of all destination rooms were back online, he said, and the expectation was that the number would rise to 100 percent by New Year’s Day.
Gamefish weren’t thrown off their routines, apparently. Captain Mike Weinhofer of Compass Rose Charters reported a good bite for small sailfish in the Fall and was confident that big sailfish would be coming in behind them in January. “Schools of Mahi [dolphin fish] are big and hungry and in all the places they’re supposed to be.”
Mild temperatures will prevail from Florida to southwest Texas. Historical averages on New Year’s Day show daily temperatures range from 66 to 75 in Key West and from 55 to
68 in South Padre Island. But if you want to see what things look like in real time, multiple webcams take in waterfront scenes in the Keys and Texas: flakeys.com/webcams/ or stxmaps.com/go/south-texas-web-cams.html.
by Bill AuCoin, Southern Boating January 2018