Ernest's Way by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes

Author:Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books

Land’s End Marina (formerly Thompson’s Docks) and Turtle Kraals

Key West Bight, 201 William Street.

The Thompson family owned a fleet of fishing boats docked at their marina, and it was on one of these that Hemingway first fished the turquoise waters off Key West. In 1934, he acquired his own thirty-eight-foot craft from the Wheeler Shipyard in Brooklyn and called it Pilar, his nickname for Pauline (“Pilar” is also the name of a Catholic bullfighting shrine in Zaragoza, Spain). When I was a kid, the marina’s turtle kraals held enormous loggerhead turtles, most at least eighty years old. Since 1980 the site has been home to a Caribbean seafood restaurant and bar called Turtle Kraals.

Growing up, I had the good fortune to go fishing in the Gulf Stream, and we always departed from Land’s End Marina. I used to fantasize about becoming a first mate on one of the charter boats, getting to the marina at sunrise to prepare the boat and cut up the bait, helping to navigate, putting out the lines and throwing the chum into the water, getting to know the sea as my great-grandfather had. To this day, the memories of a day of fishing with my family are some of the fondest of my life. When I was a teenager, my mom went to Bimini in search of what many consider the greatest billfish, the blue marlin. Hemingway paid tribute to this great fish in The Old Man and the Sea. I wasn’t there to witness her bring in two of these noble fish in one day—one two hundred and fifty pounds, the other five hundred—but I remember the next time I saw her, her arm was swollen to the size of her thigh and cradled in an ACE bandage sling. I was entranced by a photograph of her in the fighting chair, wet towel on her head, straddling the enormous rod and reel.

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