With everyone running around screaming I thought I'd serve as the calm voice of reason during the mass exodus out of the Keys. We are in the Middle Keys and thus residents are allowed to stay. Everyone else has been urged to evacuate and the one east bound lane out of the Keys has been backed up ever since yesterday.  It would probably take at least six hours to get out of here... I like to stand out in the rain every now and then and point at the unmoving bumper to bumper traffic laughing.

When I returned, our resident gecko, who we've nicknamed "Fred", came out to see what the hurricane looked like this morning (July 8):

This is Fred:


Unfortunately Fred was disappointed by the boring calm overcast weather.

8:00 AM:


Then at 8:20 it started raining and blowing slightly. Myra took a movie with our little camera.
This was one of the extreme outer squalls while the hurricane is still in Cuba. We should get the major part of the storm late tonight but unfortunately it'll be too dark to take pictures so you'll just have to be happy with this.




One more movie.  This time by me.

The view of the Bay (looking north).




By 2PM, it was gone and blue skies and sunshine returned!






I told you Fred was disappointed.

It's only a flesh wound.  Just the piece of wood attached to the t.v. antennae.



First, I try to uproot this small tree with my bare hands while Myra looks on in confusion.  She points out that it's not a fallen branch but instead an actual live tree that has been in front of our door the entire time we've lived here... So I stop.
Myra -->




The debris once it was dislodged from the tree:

We use Comcast to watch t.v. instead of the antennae anyways...

A movie of our yard at 7:30PM



A movie looking back at our cottage from the nearby resort.


They're saying most of the storm surge (3 foot to 6 foot waves) will hit the southern and eastern sides of the islands.  We're located on the western side of our island.

It's basically more of the same.

Movie of the conditions at 8:30pm

The eye of the hurricane isn't supposed to pass our area until early tomorrow morning.

The rain has picked up and is now hitting the roof in pulsing bands.  The frequency of strong gusts has also increased.  It sounds like a fairly constant 45mph wind now.  According to the weather center, the strong gusts are 60mph and above.  70 mph gusts were recorded nearby in the last hour.  It still doesn't sound like much damage is going on, though.  Just sounds like twigs snapping, nothing louder.

Fred came back to visit again, but because of the storm outside he wasn't feeling as photogenic this time and he hid quickly:

Myra put out some water for him.

The electricity started going out approximately every 10 minutes starting at 2:30am last night.  It was really annoying.  Which is why we stopped making updates last night.
The eye of the hurricane is approximately 90 miles away from Key West now.  They've cancelled the hurricane watches for the Keys, but kept the tornado and flood watches and are still telling us to stay off the roads.  The television footage in Key West looks pretty wild.  It looks like you can't tell where the ocean stops and the roads begin.

Myra thought the latest radar image from the Key West weather center looks really cool:


Because of the constant on/off surges, our air conditioning tripped its GFI around 4am.  I crawled over a tangle of lawn furniture and fallen palm fronds to turn it back on just now.

Mortaly wounded!


I managed to crawl along the ground back to the apartment before I fainted from lack of excitement..  Here are the pictures I took at the risk of life and limb.

No more boats! Ahhh.... isn't that nice? I hate boats.


The wind speed has decreased a lot.  A movie of what the winds look like.
Another movie of a gust of wind hitting a palm tree. Ooo. Exciting.

Our place is mostly intact:


The bay is pretty calm despite the wind gusts.



Cuba weakened the hurricane to a category 1 by the time it made it back into the ocean.  It's since restrengthened to a Category 2.  There isn't very much damage outside our apartment.  None of the nearby properties seem damaged either.

A few fallen branches:


The nearby resort's external iguana installation was intact, the iguana unphased.



The cute little love birds outside at the resort next door were all huddled together out of the wind!


A movie of the love birds fluttering around.

1:00pm (EST)  July 9th

The cable has gone out for the first time that we've noticed. 

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We walked around our neighborhood yesterday and drove through the entire length of Islamorada today.  For this area, all of the debris seems to be about the same as what we got in our yard, mostly palm fronds and minor branches.  People on the oceanside of the islands also ended up with tons of stinky seaweed in their yards.  The ocean water today was the most brilliant blue we have seen here so far.  It looked unnaturally clean!  Even the nearby construction sites seemed untouched by the storm.




Pile of the typical debris for the Islamorada area:



A small tree that fell over:



The only major damage near us that we were able to find was a beautiful tree that had been knocked down at Coral Bay Resort:



We were very sad to find that.  Poor tree!

10 feet away from that sad scene, another tree had broken in two and fallen onto a phone line:


The phone line hadn't broken, though.