I recently visited this restaurant in Key Largo and recommend it.
The restaurant is decorated with odd nautical paraphernalia. One of the prominent exhibits looked familiar. It turned out to be the Sara G that was rowed almost all of the way across the Atlantic in the ill-fated Atlantic Odyssey challenge of 2012.
Apparently the restaurant’s owner also owns a prominent local boat-towing service and recovered the Sarah G from the ocean where it was floating upside-down and a hazard to other boats. The waitress showed us some marks on the hull that she said were bullet holes from where the Coast Guard had tried unsuccessfully to sink the Sarah G, but I don’t know if that’s really what happened. As you can see from the photos, the boat looks about like what you would expect from something that was immersed in salt water for a while. Not quite the wreck of the Titanic but interesting to see nonetheless.
It would take some courage going across the Atlantic in that
If you’re going to row a small boat across the Atlantic, I’d think one of the necessities would be a self righting boat.
IIRC they had at least one hatch open when they were hit by a rogue wave and swamped. Maybe they could have righted the boat otherwise.
If the CG wanted to sink that thing, they would have. Good story by the wait staff though.
The coast guard story may be bogus but the food was definitely the real thing.
There as a case about 30 years ago of a sailboat, a Kettenberg 43, that was found sailing under a wind vane autopilot south of Hawaii with the skeleton of the owner in the cabin. A commercial fishing boat found it sailing along on its own heading north. It seemed to be returning to Hawaii from the south Pacific and the owner was identified. He had apparently died of something and the wind vane kept it going.
Another famous case was that of Donald Crowhurst who was supposedly competing in the Round the World Race in his trimaran. The boat was finally found without him aboard and his diary revealed that the whole venture was a hoax. He had never left the south Atlantic.