November 2025
I’ve made several trips to the Keys this year. One traditional stop is the Opal Resort in Key West. Once you park in their garage you’re a block from anything you could want. On one trip we visited a few movie scene locations like the property where “True Lies” filmed Arnold with his flame-thrower which is now a beautiful home on Summerland Key.
I tracked down locations from the movie “Running Scared” with Billy Crystal & Gregory Hines, plus more recently the Apple series “Bad Monkey” with Vince Vaughn. For fans of the show, there’s even a book you can buy with 50 filming locations from the Netflix series “Bloodline.”
I jumped off the famous “Jumping Bridge” a few times and saw a few old friends, but a lot of my Keys time is spent reminiscing my younger years.
I moved to Key Largo when I was about eleven years old and got a job at the boat rentals at Pennekamp Park. The park was fun, it was busy most days and nonstop excitement. I was young, so I didn’t get to take part in a lot of the antics, but I got to watch. I wish I had taken more pictures and kept a journal.
My job was 2 hours after school and all day on weekends keeping the boats cleaned and fueled. It was pretty exciting to be that young driving 20-foot boats around the marina. I really thought I was hot-stuff! One morning while I was preparing the rental boats for a busy weekend I saw a boat was reserved for the Captain of one of the snorkel boats and his mate.
They went out to Molasses Reef which is about 5 miles off Key Largo ahead of the “Discovery,” a glass bottom tour boat. The divers, Larry & Jim, had scuba gear, beach chairs, and waterproof plastic books used for fish and coral identification.
A plan was coordinated with the captain of the glass bottom boat to have the Discovery hover over them as they were lying in their beach chairs reading their books… on the ocean floor.
The Discovery was unlike other glass-bottom boats which, like the name, “Glass-Bottom,” have glass on the bottom. The Discovery’s feature was a room where the lower sides had 3-foot glass walls viewable at a 45-degree angle so you could see out and away which not only offered a much larger view but a lot more fish activity.
Larry & Jim stashed their tanks under the chairs in a sandy patch at the reef and waited for the Discovery which was only a few minutes away. As the glass bottom boat drifted over them at Molasses Reef, they took a deep breath, hid their mask and mouthpiece, and flipped through the books as the glass bottom boat floated by.
For about a minute, tourists saw 2 people laying in beach chairs reading books underwater and had a great story to tell from a trip to a coral reef in Key Largo, if people believed them.
It was an exciting time to live in the Florida Keys.
Jim Griffiths
Publisher, Nautical Mile
