Florida Key’s Sea Base: 30 Years of Adventure

By ROBERT SILK Free Press Staff

ISLAMORADA — In the late 1970s, Sam Wampler was tasked with finding a home base for a new Boy Scouts of America program that provided adventures on the high seas for scouts from around the country.

Wampler, at the time the camping director for the Boy Scouts’ Miami region, found the spot he was looking for in 1980 on the site of a rundown hotel at the southwest tip of Lower Matecumbe.

Two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand scouts later, Florida Sea Base has become a staple of the Boy Scouts of America and a key player in the economic life of Lower Matecumbe Key and surrounding islands.

“We are literally influencing families across this nation,” said Keith Douglass, the Sea Base facilities director.

Florida Sea Base won’t officially turn 30 until this summer. But on Monday the Lower Matecumbe institution was scheduled to hold its birthday party early to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America.

Wampler passed away seven years ago, but wife Sharon remembers that first year, when she guesses 1,000 to 2,000 scouts visited the base.

According to local lore, during the summer of 1980 Sea Base staff had to fend off patrons of the old Toll Gate Inn, who were unaware that the former brothel and seedy watering hole had been converted into a place that could safely be called, well, more wholesome.

Over time those Tollgate customers disappeared entirely and Sea Base flourished. New dormitories were built, as well as an administrative building and conference center. In 1982 the scouts acquired the 105-acre Munson Island off Big Pine Key. Then in 2001 the scouts opened the Brinton Environmental Center on Summerland Key.

All are used in the various Sea Base adventures programs, which include multi-day sails, dive training, fishing excursions and primitive camping on Munson.

According to Sea Base officials, today more than 10,000 scouts a year descend upon the Lower Matecumbe locale, which is one of only three High Adventure bases run by the Boy Scouts of America.

Douglass says all those people mean big dollars to the local community. The scouts often visit local attractions like Theater of the Sea and the Florida Keys History of Diving Museum. If their families come for a visit they stay at local lodges. And Sea Base does a lot of its buying locally.

“We spent over $30,000 in bait alone just last year and that’s all local,” Douglass said.

Meanwhile, Sharon Wampler says she can’t believe how big the Sea Base program has grown over the past 30 years.

“Sam is up there just laughing at the whole thing, happy about it,” she said.

rsilk@keysnews.com