This little piggie....

Racers pig-out at the finish line

 Feb. 9-March 6
    
    Governments are tumbling in the Middle East. There is carnage in Libya. But elsewhere, life goes on -- sometimes in peculiar ways.
    That would include the annual pig races here in Marathon, Fla.
     Sponsored by the Stuffed Pig Restaurant, the event benefits a local charity.
    With names like “Harry Hambone,” “Pork Chop Pam” and “Brittany Spareribs, the little porkers may never be as famous as, say, Secretariat. But they can zip around a track to snarf up treats as fast as their little legs and squiggly tails will get them to the finish line.
    There are 14 pigs in three races held twice a day for three days. After getting the crowd whooping and hollering, a bugle is sounded and the announcer calls out the frontrunner pig with the verbal alacrity of Churchill Downs.
    “And coming around the stretch issssss the winner --“Shakin Bacon!”
    Not all the snorters broke records on the 175-foot oval track. The Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs in the third race (“The Orient Express”) took their sweet time and hammed it up despite hog-wild cheering from the grandstand. Eventually, “Sneaky Pete” made it to the finish line first.
    I hate to think what happens to the losers, like “Snoop Hoggie Hog.” The restaurant sure was serving a lot of pork barbecue under the tent. Then again, the announcer did encourage people to “Promote pork: Run over a chicken today.”

Pot-bellied pigs roaring around the track - not!

    So what’s the draw to Marathon (besides pig races?) I asked a few Krogen owners at our weekly breakfast here at Banana Bay.
    “It’s mindless...totally mindless,” said Betty Robinson on Lili. “You get up in the morning without a thought of what you’re going to do and you’ll have a fabulous day.”
    It’s laid back with an easy-going lifestyle, said Sue Mancini on Papillon. She and her husband, Rob, have been coming here for 11 years. Rob doesn’t miss having concrete high-rises sprouting above the mangroves. “Where else can you go where you’re surrounded by water and temperatures (in the 80s) this time of year?” he asks.
    Sherri Smith from Sweet Time likes the area because “it’s not touristy.” Barbara Holum on Solveig IV appreciates the palm trees, the sunshine and that this part of the Keys “is still funky.”
    The area’s colors are “mesmerizing,” said Pegge McLaughlin, pointing to swaying palm trees, luscious bougenvelia and blue-green waters out the back door of Avalon, the Krogen that she and her husband, Mike, own.
    Marathon is made up of seven Keys and got its name when the Florida East Coast Railroad was being built in the early 1900s. Many of its workers, so the story goes, complained that the project was “getting to be a real Marathon.” Although the city wasn’t incorporated until 1999, Marathon had been the name of one of the railroad’s stations and the name stuck.

The tiki hut at the Boot Key Harbor City Marina.

Some of the more than 200 boats in the harbor; many more are in marinas on either side of the harbor.

    If you leave the country by boat, U.S. Customs requires that your boat have a decal to get back in. In typical governmental bureaucratic fashion, it took a magician to get the website to work to download the form to obtain one. Then it was a convoluted process to get the little sucker sent to Philip.
    We later learned that while we didn’t need what’s called a Local Boater Option card to get back into the country, it was a good thing to do. Without the card, which (at the moment) has no expiration date, every person on the boat is required to report within 24 hours, in person, to the nearest Customs-Immigration office when they return to the country.
    We have some friends who say, “Pfft,” and don’t bother with reporting at all. After hearing stories of boaters who had to take costly taxi rides to get to an immigration office, or of being told by customs that they were too busy and the boaters had to wait a day, we decided to each get a card.
    With one, we can telephone immigration when we return to the U.S. and we’ll be done with it.
    To get the card, one must apply online and get an appointment for an interview. In our case, that meant going to the airport at Key West where the Customs/Immigration office temporarily is housed. We gave them our passports and the online application and within five minutes we had the cards, sans interview.
    It was a pleasant experience and there was nothing to it. However, when we got back to the boat that night, there were seven emails between us from Customs/Immigration with seven different passwords to get to their online site. Something’s wrong with their computer systems, we were told by phone the next day. Someone else had telephone to report that he had gotten eight emails and eight different passwords. Ah, our taxpayers’ dollars at work.

    We left the airport in Key West and had lunch at a delightful place in Key West called Blue Heaven. My friend Beth Larmour had been there and said it was great. She was right. Not only was the food good, but there were the ubiquitous chickens, roosters and baby chicks that are found roaming around Key West.
    There was an hour’s wait for lunch, so we went to the outdoor bar and met three neat folks from the Eastport Yacht Club outside of Annapolis. Bob Jones has a Catalina 47 sailboat and he and Philip talked shop. With him was his girlfriend, Pam Thompson. Kurt Wells, who had taught sailing at the Naval Academy, was in Key West helping his girlfriend move to Key West. She’s a contractor for the Navy. A steel band played in the background. Their names were called first for a table and we joined them and talked about - what else - boating!

    I made a whirlwind weekend trip home in mid-March to see my mother in Norfolk at the Ballentine. She knew me but then started talking about “her husband” and “the little ones” (my brother and me). Sad, but she doesn’t seem to be any worse the wear for her memory loss. I spent the night with Janice and Jack Hornbeck and we went to our favorite Norfolk restaurant - Luna Maya. Janice, Joan Hecht and I had a great lunch the next day. I picked the perfect time to be back in Edenton -- Betsy and Warren Bixler had their annual “oyster weekend” with friends Sarita and Donald from Virginia. Talk about fantastic dishes! Wow! It was an unusually warm weekend (mid 70s) in southern Virginia and northeast North Carolina -- still, I was struck by how brown everything is. It’s easy to get used to the vivid winter colors in the Keys.

    The wind has been howling here in Marathon with more on the way; the harbor looks more like the ocean. Boats on moorings are swinging around as far as their tethers allow. The winds have delayed our trip north to Miami for what looks like another week. We’ll then wait for a good weather window to cross over to the Bahamas -- heading to Bimini first to check in with Bahamian immigration, then near Cat or Chubb Cays and onward through the Exumas.
    We’ll then push north to the Abacos before returning to Florida or points north some time in early May.