Jared and I spent a really great day out on Biscayne Bay with our good friend Carlos. Carlos has a classic 25-foot Boston Whaler, aptly named “Slingshot”. No frills, just good boat. We had hoped to do an underwater photography mission on some local Miami reefs, but my camera kit acted up at the last second (figures), so we scrapped the shoot and enjoyed a day on the water instead. We cruised down south out of Coral Gables’, past ‘Mt. Trashmore’ (a huge stinking landfill), past the Turkey Point nuclear reactor, and then around the tip of Elliot Key, before heading back north along the ocean side of the Keys.

We saw several solitary dolphin jumping and quite a number of Portuguese man-o-war ‘jellyfish’. These animals aren’t true jellyfish, but are actually a colony of tiny hydroid-like polyps called siphonophores, that link together in long, powerfully stinging tentacles. I’m not sure exactly how the colony is able to produce the gas-filled float that allows it to catch the breezes, perhaps someone else can educate me there. Maybe these creatures know something…

The most noticeable thing about being out on the water in Biscayne Bay is just how much bigger the Miami skyline has gotten in the past 8 years from when I first arrived in the MIA. It’s pretty impressive looking now, but I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen to all those new, vacant condo high rises what with the real estate bubble all but imploded. Even the buildings that are recently completed seem mostly unoccupied. You can look up the whole front of a building, and see not one piece of deck furniture, or any other piece of evidence suggesting that it is otherwise occupied. And even still, they are breaking ground on new buildings, even in the wake of the obvious real estate market crash. The wild card for Miami though, is whether the declining dollar will bring in a bunch of buyers from Europe and South America who want a Club Land getaway residence. I think that this would be preferable, in that these buyers would probably be a lot less reliant upon the city’s unprepared infrastructure. I don’t think that downtown Miami is capable of supporting the population increase that would come with permanent residents living and working in the area. In any case, from out on the water, the city looks Magic.