Back home in the Keys

We went through the mangrove channels exploring and ended up finding a plane that had recently crashed.  Dad wanted to check it out and ended up falling and cutting himself on the broken glass.  We headed back slowly and were checking out one of the boiling holes when my brother pointed out Larry the Lobster.  Mom immediately put her snorkel gear on and caught him.  He had probally lived there for who knows how many years.  Larry ended up being dinner for six.  My mom brother and I were also exploring and finding key lime trees and coconut trees.  We took the husks off of the coconuts with hammers and screw drivers while holding the coconuts with our feet like little monkeys.  Mom made coconut pie and we made key lime aid.  There were caves on the island that a family used to live in back in the 1960's.  They had different parts of the caves that they used as bedrooms, ect and an oven they carved out of the rock.  We spent the rest of the year sailing the Bahamas, away from the rest of the world.  Eventually we made it back home to the Keys started going to school again and getting back into the routine of the real world.  Mom and Dad ended up getting a divorce after returning and we lived with our mom on a sailboat called Mariah.  Mariah was a steel sailboat built by some Australians to travel around the world.  We lived on Mariah for awhile before moving onto an old 75 ft yacht named Nepenthe.  She was built in 1912 I believe, made out of Dade County Pine which is now extinct.  She had 2 floors.  The top floor included the wheelhouse and a large room we used as the living room.  Downstairs had 3 bathrooms, engine room, kitchen, large dining room, 2 small bedrooms and the master bedroom.  All the doors had the old brass and crystal knobs. She bought the boat from a man named Russell Niedhawk.  His wife had died before I met him but she had written a book called Charlotte's Story.  A true first-hand account of their lives on Elliot Key during the mid 1930's and their struggles to survive on an isolated key with rum-runners, smugglers, local Conch spongers, and an assorted cast of characters. With no running water or electricity, they had to make do by finding things on the beach, making tools, surviving the mosquitoes and fishing for food.   The story culminates with their struggles to survive the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.  My home life was not the best at this time and I eventually bought a houseboat to live on.  I was not 18 but had my boat close to my mother's.  I ended up going to Mexico on a trip and falling in love with a little town called El Santo Desierto Del Carmen.  A small village on top of a mountain in Central Mexico.