2021-05-27

Hello Key Biscayne!

The first signs of our summer of seaweed arrived this week and ruined at least one beachgoing experience (mine), and our police chief suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly) retires.

How far can you swim?

Read on, read on.

Into the sunset KBPD Chief Charles Press announced his plan to resign on Tuesday. After working on the Key for 17 years, and in law enforcement for 30 more than that, he’ll be stepping down officially on July 2nd.

In a letter to the manager and council, he cited his accomplishments, as well as reasons for stepping down such as the toll it takes on one’s family. One thing he didn’t do was call out all the entitled jerks on the island and their bastard kids, but there’s just some things you don’t talk about in public. 👮‍♀️

(Islander News)

We already beat the seaweed / dirty beach topic to death back in 2019. This isn’t about that. We still don’t have a solution. The seaweed is going to be a thing forever and the bacteria levels will go up and down all summer; whatever.

This is about how to avoid the seaweed. You would think you could just look at that new beach cam, but that’s not very accurate. You might check it in the morning when the tractors have swept up all the seaweed. By the time you finally walk into the sand there’s seaweed in the surf for the first 30m and it smells like the bottom of a Key Colony stairwell.

"Maybe it smells different down there."

No, the best way to know if you should go to the beach is to check the wind. If it’s blowing from the east, and has been blowing from the east, you can expect it to be nasty out there.

This weekend's forecast. Guess what it means.

The level of nasty depends. As the seaweed just starting coming in this week, the amount of seaweed an east wind will blow in from the gulf stream may be low, but the east wind trick is still a good rule of thumb. Conversely, a west wind will make for perfectly flat, beautiful, Bahamas-like water. Anything in-between will be, well, in-between.

The east wind later that same day. It even swept in a tractor.

Could this whole thing have been a one-liner? Sure, but it would have been harder to contextualize the photos. Anywho, avoid an east wind at the beach. 💨

This one comes to us from a reader (thanks, Y!).

Apparently, this tree on Crandon for weeks had a statuette of Jesus in its hole (or maybe it was the Virgin Mary, or maybe San Lazaro–they were going 45 every time they saw it) and suddenly it disappeared.

Jesus is the second thing that comes to mind.

That’s the whole story. 🤷‍♀️ If you have any more info on this holy holey tree please reply to this email.

On the half-assed commentary that went with the masks article last week:

Many fully vaccinated people who can and do read extensively are still choosing to wear masks in some indoor locations.

-AM

That remark was st***d. 🙄
How about this.

-C

Ed note: Totally agree, it wasn’t a good thing to write, and it wasn’t even funny in the typical snarky way of this publication. People can have all sorts of reasons to wear a mask even if they’re allowed not to.

Sorry, won’t happen again, though we will surely make other errors of judgement in the future. Send an email for a refund.

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Questions, comments, tips, or to summon Babalú from the roots of the tree of life together 🙌, write to hi@tropicalrag.com.

More on the chief resigning next week. In the meantime grab yourself a poppy this weekend and enjoy the time off.

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