Crocodile danger grows in Marathon

First let me say that I own a slip in Marathon and live on my boat. As a slip owner, I pay taxes. From time to time I hire a local diver to clean some of the growth from my boat’s bottom.

My question came from the diver who asked, after hearing of an eight-foot crocodile swimming in the canal, “Who should her mother and brother sue when the croc grabs her?” I did not know the answer.

Would it be the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for allowing a predator back around people? Would it be the city of Marathon for not protecting it citizens? Would it be Monroe County for spending its ever-growing pot of tourist tax money to bring more people to the Keys and thereby exposing them to Crocodiles as a deadly attraction?

Or would it be me for hiring her in the first place?

The pets lost to crocodiles in Islamorada should be a wake-up call (if the public heard about them). Just how many crocodiles have been removed from Marathon and its surrounding waters in the last three years? (Shh, the tourists don’t know. Hell, the locals don’t know.)

Who’s child should be the first? A tourist’s, a locale’s? How much is a child worth these days? We should ask Disney World.

In the end, I told the diver it would be her bad luck to be the first, and what are the odds of that anyway? She would get better odds at the casinos. But it is a nasty death we are talking about.

I guess that is more than one question, sorry. But not as sorry as the official response to crocodiles in our canals. Right now the only plan they have is if you see one, call the FWC and they will come out and look at it too. In the Keys, it is not the terrorists bombs we fear, it is what is just below the surface and the idiocy that leads us.

This story was originally published September 7, 2016 at 9:12 AM with the headline "Crocodile danger grows in Marathon."