There's a Movie Star Docked at Mile Marker 100

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Florida Keys Road Trip | September 29, 2026

Hey Keys lovers! Almost nobody stops in Key Largo.

That is not an insult. It is just what happens. You come down from Miami, you hit the first mile markers, and your brain is already three hours south. Key Largo becomes the place you drive through on the way to the place you are going.

Which means a whole lot of people have driven past a genuine piece of movie history sitting in the water at mile marker 100, tied up behind a hotel, waiting to take passengers out.

Not a replica. Not a tribute.

The actual boat.

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❓ Keys Trivia

A boat from a 1951 Humphrey Bogart movie is still in the Florida Keys, still running, and still taking passengers out on the water.

Which movie?

Answer at the bottom of the newsletter.

📣 The Mile Marker Roundup

Quiet stretch on the calendar before October gets loud, so here is another week of the stuff that runs every day and never makes anybody's list.

North to south. Most of it free.

🦩 MM 106, Key Largo: Florida Keys Wild Bird Center A rescue center with a boardwalk out over the mangroves and a lot of pelicans, hawks and herons who are not going anywhere. Donation at the door. Twenty minutes, and it is the best possible first stop on the drive down. Directions →

🚢 MM 100, Key Largo: Ride the African Queen This week's Deep Dive, so we will keep it short. Canal and sunset cruises on the actual boat from the actual movie, a few at a time, out of the marina behind the hotel. Call ahead. Directions →

🏖️ MM 73, Islamorada: Anne's Beach Free. A boardwalk through the mangroves, a long shallow flat you can wade out into for what feels like a quarter mile, and picnic tables. It is the beach locals send you to when you ask for a beach. Directions →

🐚 MM 37, Bahia Honda: Calusa Beach The small one, on the near side, facing the old bridge. Calm, shallow, and the water color does not look real in photographs. Get there before eleven or park in the overflow lot and walk. Directions →

🌅 MM 0, Key West: Sunset at Fort Zachary Taylor Everybody goes to Mallory Square. The locals drive to Fort Zach, sit on the rocks, and watch the same sun go down with about four percent of the crowd and no bagpipes. Small entry fee. Worth every penny. Directions →

☕ MM 0, Key West: Cuban Coffee at Five Brothers A corner grocery in a residential neighborhood off Duval where you order at a window and drink it standing on the sidewalk. Get a café con leche and a Cuban mix. This is breakfast for people who live here. Directions →

🌴 Partner Spotlight

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🧩 Deep Dive

The Boat That Outlived Everybody

In 1951, John Huston took Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn to Africa and shot a film on a river in miserable heat with a small, ugly, extremely loud steam launch as the third lead.

The African Queen. Bogart won his only Oscar for it.

The boat was real. It was not built for the movie. It had already been working for forty years by the time a film crew found it, hauling cargo and hunting parties around East Africa after being built in England back in 1912.

When the film wrapped, the boat went back to being a boat.

And then, the way these things go, it disappeared into decades of owners, neglect, and long stretches of sitting in the weeds somewhere.

Somebody eventually dragged it to Florida.

For years it sat in Key Largo in rough shape, occasionally patched, mostly admired from a distance by people who knew what it was. At one point it was more or less abandoned.

Then it got restored. Properly. Down to the steam boiler, which works.

So now there is a 114-year-old steam launch tied up behind a hotel at mile marker 100, and you can get on it. Six or eight people at a time. Canal cruise or sunset cruise. It chugs, it hisses, it smells faintly like a machine shop.

There is no theming. Nobody is in costume. There is no gift shop full of merchandise.

It is just the boat, still running, more than a century after somebody in England built it for a job that no longer exists.

Bogart is gone. Hepburn is gone. Huston is gone.

The boat is at mile marker 100, taking reservations.

🕊️ While You're in Key Largo

The Statue Under the Water

Six miles offshore, in about twenty five feet of water, there is a nine-foot bronze statue of Christ standing on the bottom of the ocean with his arms raised toward the surface.

It has been down there since 1965, a gift from an Italian diving family, cast from the same mold as one that sits on the seafloor off Genoa.

Divers go. Snorkelers go too, because on a calm clear day you can see it from the surface, which is a strange thing to be able to say.

It is part of John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, the first undersea park in the United States. Boats run out to it from Key Largo most days.

Bring nothing. Take nothing. People have been visiting it politely for sixty years.

🍹 Four Things We'd Tell a Friend

Call the African Queen before you drive there.

It is a small boat with a small schedule and it does not run when the weather says no. Ten minutes on the phone saves you an hour of disappointment.

Do the Wild Bird Center on the way down, not the way back.

On the way back you will be tired and sunburned and you will skip it. Everybody skips it on the way back.

Fort Zach fills up.

The park has a gate and a capacity, and on a nice evening it closes to new cars earlier than you would think. Get in well before sunset and bring something to sit on, because it is rocks and coarse sand, not a beach chair situation.

Bring cash for the coffee window.

Five Brothers is a neighborhood grocery, not a cafe with a POS system and a tip screen. Small bills, exact-ish change, and get out of the way of the guy behind you who does this every morning.

📖 One More Thing

Lost in the Keys: Mile Marker Thoughts came out last week.

It is about this drive. The bridges, the bars, the stops you mean to make and the ones you make by accident, and what goes through your head on a road that is mostly water.

Thank you to everybody who picked one up in the first week. The notes that came back have been the best part.

Get the book → Lost In The Keys

🕰️ Lore & Legends

The Bar That Has Been Claiming It Since 1948

At mile marker 104 in Key Largo there is a low, plain building on the water called the Caribbean Club.

It is the last remaining structure Carl Fisher built in Key Largo, from back when he was trying to make the Upper Keys happen the way he had made Miami Beach happen. He died before it amounted to much.

What the Caribbean Club has instead is a claim.

The 1948 Bogart film Key Largo was shot mostly on a Hollywood soundstage. Everybody knows this. But some second-unit footage came from down here, and the Caribbean Club has spent nearly eighty years cheerfully insisting that it is in the movie.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.

What is definitely true is that it is a genuine no-frills local bar with the best free sunset view in Key Largo, a pool table, and people who have been drinking there since before you were born.

Go at six. Order a beer. Ask somebody about the movie.

You will get an answer. Possibly several, and not all of them compatible.

✅ Trivia Answer

The African Queen.

Built in England in 1912. Filmed with Bogart and Hepburn in 1951. Restored, running, and docked at mile marker 100 in Key Largo, where it still takes passengers out.

Seventy five years after the movie, you can ride the co-star.

If you have stopped in Key Largo on purpose, hit reply and tell us what you stopped for. We suspect the list is shorter than it should be.

And if you are heading down soon, try this.

Do not treat Key Largo as the hallway.

Get off US-1 at the first mile marker that interests you and see what happens. The island chain is 106 miles long and everybody spends their time in the last one.

Some of the best of it is in the first ten.

Until next week, keep your windows down and your watch off.

The Florida Keys Road Trip Team

FloridaKeysResorts.com can help you compare places to stay in Key Largo and the rest of the island chain, with nobody taking a commission out of the middle.

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