Nancy Klingener

The Coast Guard came across a floating tiki bar off Key West Wednesday morning — and the operator was slumped over the controls.

To spread the word about limiting the spread of coronavirus, the Florida Keys tourism agency is turning to some famous faces — one in particular: Ernest Hemingway.

A state senator from Bradenton has filed a bill that would roll back Key West's strict limits on cruise ship visitation.

The Audubon Christmas Bird Count is a tradition that goes back 120 years. Those counts went ahead in South Florida this year, despite the pandemic. But there were some changes.

Bars and alcohol sales in Key West will close at 10 p.m. on New Year's Eve and through the weekend. A federal judge Tuesday denied a challenge from a resident who said the curfew violated his Constitutional rights.

A museum in Key West has captured a sound "carried across the centuries" — the boatswain's whistle, or pipe, from the Santa Margarita, a Spanish treasure ship that sank in a hurricane in 1622.

There used to be a tradition of making homemade candy in Key West's Black community. Among the best were members of the Allen-Butler-Carey family — the ABC family.

Like a lot of other things, electricity is expensive in the Keys, because of the cost of maintaining the system to send power down from the mainland. Now there's a new effort to harness an abundant energy source — sunshine.

Every year a lighted Christmas tree appears on the old Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys — on a section that's not connected to land. WLRN spoke with a couple of the "elves" behind the annual lighting and decoration of Fred the Tree.

Usually Key West is packed for New Year's Eve with tens of thousands of people crowding downtown to watch various things drop at midnight. There's a drag queen in a ruby slipper, a pirate on a ship mast and a conch shell at Sloppy Joe's. All those events have been canceled for this year and the city is further trying to discourage crowds with a curfew well before midnight.

WLRN's Florida Keys reporter Nancy Klingener shares a recipe from her grandmother for our community cookbook.

On Election Day, Key West voters approved three measures that would severely limit the cruise industry on the island. That issue was already in court — and now the people who pushed for the new limits want to stay part of the legal battle.