Sitting recently on the patio at one of my new favorite restaurants, the Casey Key Fish House, I stared out at the island you see pictured above. Curious about what it was, I made a mental note to look for it on the map when I got home. It shouldn't have surprised me to find that Google Maps listed no name for this island - they don't know the names of most of the islands out there. But when I went to Flash Earth - which usually is an excellent resource for determining the nomenclature of even some of the tiniest sandbars - I got nothing.
This will not do.
As I've ranted elsewhere in this venue, I simply cannot abide unnamed islands. Most of the thousands of Florida islands, if you believe the maps, aren't named - but way back in the days of old when ships were bold just like the men who sailed them, I am certain that every freakin' teensy-tiny key, isle, islet, atoll, archipelago and half-sunken sandbar had some sort of name assigned to it. Sailors had their own names for them which varied from man to man, and locals had their own names for them too. And if you want to go all the way back, the indigenous tribes who were here first undoubtedly had a name for each of them. It's up to someone to slog through the dusty old records of the past, glean this data, and drag it back to present time.
And of course, that someone is probably going to have to be me.
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