After our 2019 eight week southern US National Parks trip, friends would ask us which park we liked best. Our answer – Dry Tortugas. Then they’d ask which one we liked least. The answer – Dry Tortugas. Yes, it’s an amazing park, but it can also be a hot mess. Read on for our awesome journey…and misadventures.
We visited Dry Tortugas in October 2019
Getting
There
Dry Tortugas is one of the more challenging National Parks to visit. First, you need to get to Key West, which is a 3 hour drive from Miami. Once you’ve made it to Key West, you might as well spend a few days there as it’s great fun, with lots of excellent eateries and bars. To get to Dry Tortugas, unless you have your own boat, you have two choices – taking a float plane or getting on the daily ferry. The Yankee Freedom III sails from Key West each morning at 8am and typically gets to Fort Jefferson a little past 10am. The return trip leaves at 3pm, so a day trip leaves you less than 5 hours to explore and grab lunch. But for us and our RV, it was even more complicated. First, we wanted to see a sunset, a sunrise, and maybe some amazing night skies. So we had to arrange to camp overnight on the Dry Tortugas and Garden Key. It sure sounds like tropical paradise. Fortunately, there’s a service in Key West that provides rental camp gear for the trip and they drop it off at the dock. Perfect. Second, Key West is rather unfriendly to RVs. There is no place to legally park a rig, so we had to leave Eddie at the RV park while we visited the island. That was a $100+ parking spot. The final challenge was getting from the RV park to the dock with food, drink, and ice to make it through a day. Ruby Sue to the rescue again. We were able to find a rare free parking spot at the dock and carry our food/water/ice to the dock where we also picked up our camping gear. It was all perfectly choreographed and we successfully made it to Dry Tortugas NP.
Fort
Jefferson
Back in the mid 1800’s, Fort Jefferson was built to protect the US trade routes connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. It was, and likely still is, the largest all masonry fort in the US. This fort is enormous and has some interesting history. Atop the fort, there are still six giant 25 ton Rodman cannons. I don’t know if the fort ever actually saw any action, but by the time of the Civil War, it was repurposed as a prison. Union Army criminals that came to Fort Jefferson suffered in miserable conditions. Unrelenting sun and mosquitoes combined with a lack of fresh water (thus the name “Dry” Tortugas) led to moniker Devil’s Island. The most famous prisoner here was Dr. Samuel Mudd who was convicted in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln because he provided medical care to John Wilkes Booth hours after he broke his leg jumping from the President’s Box after shooting Lincoln at Ford Theater. He didn’t know about the shooting, so he probably shouldn’t have been convicted. During his time at Fort Jefferson, Mudd helped treat prisoners and guards during a yellow fever outbreak and was eventually pardoned by Andrew Johnson in 1869. The tour led by Park Rangers at Fort Jefferson is very cool and not to be missed.
Snorkling
Bonanza
The waters around the fort are crystal clear, calm, and full of colorful fish. You can get snorkel and fins on the island too. Few people are able to do both the fort tour and snorkel, but since we were staying the night, we could swim without a schedule. We had our underwater camera and while the fish were beautiful, the coolest part was the sound of the larger fish munching on the coral.
Beware What
Comes Out
After Dark
The sunset from the fort was spectacular. The angles of the walls and the cannons both made excellent partners to the sunset photos. There were only 2 other couples sharing the sunset from the fort. Excellent. We made our way back to our campsite and ate dinner as darkness overwhelmed the island. Unfortunately, it was cloudy, so night photos were out of the question. This is where things turned ugly. It was a windless evening, so there was no breeze to offset the 80+ degree temps and humidity. Yuch. As we were trying to get to sleep, one of the other nearby campers began throwing up. I don’t know how much she had to drink, but she barfed enough for a lifetime. Poor thing. I hope they had plenty of water, cuz dehydration would have been miserable. Anyway, we thought that maybe it would be less miserable if we could open the flap to the tent to capture any small breeze. But that was impossible because once the night was in full swing, the rats came out. And not just one or two. It seemed like an army of them running around the campground, fighting and screeching for hours. That was the clincher. I think we maybe got 2 hours of sleep and I got both of them. Poor Rainy got an awful heat rash and at the first sign of light was out of the tent in search of sunrise photos. I did a little more snorkeling in the morning, but once the Yankee Freedom showed up, we climbed aboard to rest and rehydrate.
All in all, our trip to Dry Tortugas was magnificent. It’s definitely worth a day trip and you can fit both the fort and some awesome snorkeling in if you’re efficient with your time. If you choose to camp, may the breezes be in your favor. Regardless, it will be memorable.
