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In November, when the Crystal Serenity moored at Pier B, a dozen cruise ship supporters greeted guests with signs emblazoned with things like “Welcome to Key West. We missed you.”
“Today is pretty monumental for us,” DJ Halligan, whose family owns Tropical Vibes ice cream shop, says WRLNSouth Florida’s main public radio station when the ship arrived. “We have a chance to save our business now.”
Two weeks later, about 300 inhabitants gathered to protest the arrival of another cruise ship, norwegian dawnone 965 feet, 3,300 people vessel owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines. As Arlo Haskell addressed the crowd ashore through a loudspeaker system, Will Benson led a flotilla of 45 boats flying Safer, Cleaner Ships flags. A drone in the sky captured images of the ship entering the port. As the boat approached, it kicked up a trail of sediment adjacent to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Watching the footage is like watching a slow-motion video of gallons and gallons of chocolate milk being poured into a swimming pool, with brown clouds slowly billowing in the surrounding water.
“No one can watch one of these videos and be like, ‘Sure, it’s okay,'” Benson says. “It’s just undeniable. You can see this trail of silt from space. It’s even worse than what we knew it was at the start of all this, and we have documented this.”
In an email to OutsideWalsh refuted the claim that cruise ship silt damages coral, citing a letter from a renowned researcher working for the consultancy firm. Dial Cordy and Associates Inc. stating that while it “is true that sediment disturbance, as evidenced by the murky plumes you see generated by cruise ships, is unsightly, these plumes cause no measurable harm to coral”.
Since this spring, about three cruise ships a week have docked in Key West. Critics watch each docking with a keen eye, documenting various infractions, such as the arrival of ships so large they are unable to meet the very strict restrictions on underwater areas maintained by the city and the Navy, which has an adjoining harbour.
“The community is ready to move on,” Benson says. But the issue of cruise ships in Key West is still unresolved.
With fewer boats arriving than in 2019, downtown crowds have been kept to a minimum and the economy has mostly thrived. Sales tax revenue in 2021 was up 25% from 2019, which had been a record year. Robert Goltz, executive vice president of the Key West Chamber of Commerce, says this boom can be attributed, at least in part, to the effect of the pandemic on tourism in general. “If you wanted to go to a sunny island, you weren’t going out of the country because of COVID,” he says. “Key West was people’s Caribbean option. If it weren’t for COVID, I think the numbers would be very different, in the opposite direction.
Local distaste for tourists dates back to the road’s inception, but much of the recent antipathy for travelers is not the result of individual bad behavior but of their collective impact.
Steven Nekhaila thinks the same thing, that the influx of tourists and tourist dollars at the end of 2021 and 2022 was due to Americans being on domestic rather than international tropical vacations. According to him, these tourists will soon be directed elsewhere and the city must encourage tourism of all kinds, including the reception of cruise passengers.
“I don’t think there’s too much tourism,” he says. “As long as the laws are obeyed and people are not intruding, it should be encouraged, because it makes it possible for everyone to live here.”
This is of course not how anti-cruise proponents see it. “The pandemic has provided a kind of real-world experiment: What happens to the environment when you take out the big ships? What happens to the economy? Haskell says. “Most people would have thought, sure, the environment would get better, but the economy would get worse. And, in fact, they both improved.
In other words, the past year and a half without ships has only strengthened the argument that Key West would gain more by prioritizing sustainable overnight tourism, with its higher value per tourist, rather than to the large cruise ship crowds.
“We’re a laid-back community,” says Mayor Johnston, “and that’s the kind of experience we’d like to provide for people who choose to visit us.
When I was there last year, as cruise ships waited for CDC approval to sail, walking around Key West felt like a private tour of Machu Picchu. The streets were mostly quiet and this gave a completely different vibe to the city. You can walk rather than push. The stores were happy to accommodate you, rather than rushing you after buying a $10 piece of jewelry. You can enjoy key lime pie on a stick on a sidewalk and not worry about getting bumped into.
The only nuisance was endearing: the constant crowing of wild roosters, which had become a kind of mascot for the island. Their protected status arose in typical Key West fashion. Some of the birds are the descendants of fighting cocks brought by expatriates from the Caribbean islands in the early 20th century. Key West eventually banned cockfighting and to prevent the owners from simply killing the roosters (at least according to local legend), the area was declared a no-kill island.
Today, roosters are accepted as a natural part of the ecosystem, despite their morning noise attacks. However, even as a protected species, to fight against overpopulation, the island send them to the mainland. Whether Key West can do that with its other invasive species remains to be seen.
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