A lighthearted water-skiing jaunt doesn’t normally contain Cuban gunboats and 6-foot seas. However the late Key West mayor Charles “Sonny” McCoy encountered each in 1978, when he accepted a problem to water ski from his island house to Cuba on a single slalom ski — a grueling feat that spanned 122 miles and took simply over six hours.
A Key West native, McCoy was the son of a circus tightrope walker who as soon as traversed a part of the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. As a little bit boy he performed with Ernest Hemingway’s sons, Gregory and Patrick, unaware that the person who yelled at him for making an excessive amount of noise was the famend author.
Sonny was Key West’s mayor from 1971 to 1981. So his ski journey to Cuba, occurring throughout his tenure, appeared so weird that it earned nationwide publicity. Most Key Westers, nevertheless, took it in stride — a testomony to the island metropolis’s prevailing quirkiness.
“In Key West, we’re a little bit bizarre,” Sonny admitted in an interview years later. “All we want is a silly cause, or no cause in any respect, to do one thing.”
The mayor was already well-known for snowboarding previous Key West’s Mallory Sq. at Christmastime, dressed as Santa Claus and tossing items to youngsters on the pier. He additionally accomplished a nonstop 70-mile journey from Key West to the Dry Tortugas.
In line with Sonny, the Cuba marathon wasn’t his concept. It was impressed by Wendy Tucker, then a younger reporter for a Key West newspaper, whose non-local writer didn’t consider her tales of the mayor’s water-skiing exploits.
To show she wasn’t exaggerating, Wendy talked Sonny into the trek to the Tortugas. After that, his cronies figured a nonstop Cuba crossing was the subsequent logical step.
Planning and finishing up the journey concerned then-President Jimmy Carter, quite a few bemused officers and the Cuban authorities. An opportunity dialog at a nationwide mayoral convention set plans in movement.
“A bunch of us mayors have been having catfish and hush puppies with President Carter,” Sonny mentioned years later, as matter-of-factly as if sharing southern-fried meals with the president was completely regular. “At the moment, he was sort of favorable to renewing relations with Cuba, and I informed him what we had in thoughts.”
Whether or not due to the catfish or the idea’s breathtaking lunacy, Sonny and his slalom ski ultimately obtained the inexperienced mild.
A primary try failed 20 miles off Havana after the ski skewered a floating bale of marijuana (recognized within the Keys as a “sq. grouper”) and McCoy’s arms, clenched across the tow rope’s deal with, began bleeding too badly for him to proceed.
The second attempt, nevertheless, was an unqualified success. With oven mitts to guard his arms, Sonny skied nonstop from Key West Harbor to Havana Harbor behind a 58-foot Hatteras known as the Bullwinkle.
About 20 miles from Havana, Sonny and the Bullwinkle have been greeted by a pair of Russian-built Cuban gunboats that offered escort. And after he landed in Havana, the Cuban authorities threw a celebration honoring his accomplishment.
“One minister on the social gathering informed me I had skied over an space the place they caught the 2 largest nice white sharks ever caught within the Atlantic Ocean, and requested if that scared me,” recalled Sonny. “I mentioned, ‘Nicely, it will have should you hadn’t already pulled these two large moms out of there.’”
Rapidly changing into the stuff of legend, the feat even attracted the eye of famed newsman Charles Kuralt, who filmed a phase on Sonny for his Sunday morning TV program.
Sonny McCoy died in 2020, after being embroiled in controversy in his later years, when he had turn into a county commissioner. However old-time residents nonetheless keep in mind his aquatic escapade — and Key West’s distinctive water-skiing mayor.