TIME FOR A KEYS CHANGE

Elliott Maurice pulls out all the stops with a Florida cruise his son will never forget

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After a year and a half with my Axopar 22, its first 130 engine hours have been made up entirely of short hops. They've tended to involve either trips to restaurants along the Florida Intracoastal or 12-mile jaunts to the islands of Lake Erie. But when my 24-year-old son, Henry, comes for a visit from Blighty, I usually try to plan something really memorable. I've been itching to run the inside of the Florida Keys, threading through the mangroves to one of the many smaller Keys in the southern half. It's not well suited to bigger boats, due to the many sandbars and shallows and it has to be said, 130 miles in a 22-footer is also a significant distance. But my Axopar is more than capable. With careful monitoring of cruising speeds, it has enough range for the one-way trip and with an engine-down draft of just 2ft 8in, shallow water is not a major concern either. The only issue was whether Henry would love it or hate it - and I firmly believed it would be the former.

Having decided on the exclusive Hawks Cay resort on Duck Key, I booked a room for two nights at $800 a night and the marina on DOCWA at a whopping $220 a night plus resort fee. But with houses starting at more than $10 million, it didn't seem all that unreasonable to me.

The trip itself, although not overly complex, requires accurate navigation to find the small cut-throughs in the barrier islands but an early start on 5 March at the bottom of the rising tide would work in our favour because in the unlikely event of getting grounded, the rising water would free us up quite quickly.