Three men are currently locked in what one local newspaper described as a beard contest measured to the point below the chin, no stretching allowed. It sounds like a joke, and it partly is. But the fact that Marathon takes a beard-length dispute seriously enough to write rules for it tells you something the tourist guides never will: this town keeps score on itself, out loud, every single year, and the scorecard is longer and stranger than you'd expect from a city built on thirteen islands.
That contest is one line item on the 2026 Best of Marathon ballot, the Keys Weekly's annual community awards, now in its sixteenth year. Voting on this year's finalists closed at midnight on Sunday, September 6. The winners get announced at a gala inside Hawks Cay Resort's Dolphin Ballroom on Saturday, September 19. Which means that right now, this week, nobody in Marathon actually knows who won anything. That gap between the vote and the reveal is the most honest week of the year to look at what this town actually runs on.
The Ballot Is Longer Than the Chamber of Commerce List
Most visitor guides to Marathon describe the same handful of attractions: the Turtle Hospital, Crane Point, the Seven Mile Bridge. Best of Marathon skips all of that and asks a different question entirely. Who runs the best day care? Who details your boat? Who cleans your pool well enough that they show up to accept the trophy with a gold-plated prop?
That last one isn't hypothetical. In 2024, Spotless Pool Cleaning won Best Pool Service and did exactly that. The same year, Tyrone's Mobile Car Wash took Best Car Wash, Cool Runnings Marine Spa won Best Marine Detailing, and a woman named Catherine Dunn was crowned Best Hugger, a category the paper apparently could not resist adding once someone nominated her for it. A year later, Grace Jones Day Care Center was named Best Day Care and a pet named Zeke won Best Celebrity Pet on the same ballot. None of these are restaurants or resorts. None of them show up in a Google search for things to do in Marathon. They are the actual infrastructure of a small, isolated city, the people who keep your boat's hull clean and your toddler fed lunch, and Best of Marathon is the only place all of them get named on the same night as the town's best key lime pie.
Here's a sample of what the ballot actually spans, pulled from recent winner lists:
| Category | Recent Winner |
|---|---|
| Best Cuban Sandwich | La Niña Restaurant |
| Best Dessert Spot | Sweet Savannah's |
| Best Car Wash | Tyrone's Mobile Car Wash |
| Best Marine Detailing | Cool Runnings Marine Spa |
| Best Pool Service | Spotless Pool Cleaning |
| Best Day Care | Grace Jones Day Care Center |
| Best Hugger | Catherine Dunn |
| Best Celebrity Pet | Zeke |
A restaurant roundup would stop at the food. This list doesn't, because the people who vote aren't visitors ranking a vacation. They're residents ranking the people they actually call when something breaks.
Sixteen Years, One Ballroom, One Charity Partner
The awards started in 2008, which puts this year's edition at its sixteenth run. Over that stretch the Keys Weekly has partnered every year with the Rotary Club of Marathon, and together the two have raised more than $150,000 for local charitable causes while crowning over 1,000 individual winners. That's not a footnote. It means the joke categories and the serious ones are funding the same thing, and the town's willingness to argue publicly about who has the best beard is, structurally, a fundraising mechanism dressed up as a bar bet.
The mechanics are simple enough to explain in one breath. Nominations open in late July and run about two weeks. The top three nominees in each category become finalists, and the public votes again to pick the winner from that final three, once per day, per person, for roughly a month. Winners find out the same night everyone else does, at the gala.
Votes From Five Continents
The part that surprised me most in the research wasn't the beard contest. It was learning that Best of Marathon regularly draws votes from outside the country entirely. According to the paper's own count from last year's cycle, ballots came in from five continents and more than a dozen countries. That is a strange number for a small city to produce, and it says something specific about who considers Marathon home even when they're not physically on Vaca Key. Seasonal residents, family members who've moved away, second-home owners who split their year between here and somewhere colder: all of them apparently care enough about who wins Best Hugger to log in from wherever they are and vote.
That's not a fact you'll find in a chamber brochure, because a chamber brochure doesn't track international ballot traffic on a beard contest. It's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're actually reading the local paper's own coverage of its own event, which is a decent proxy for reading the town itself.
What Saturday Night Actually Looks Like
The gala isn't open to the general public. Winners, finalists, and invited dignitaries get tickets, and additional seats go out on a first come, first served waitlist that opens by emailing the paper directly. If you want in and you're not already a nominee, that email is the only door. The event takes over Hawks Cay Resort's Dolphin Ballroom, the same property that's spent the past year building a name for itself around Salt + Ash, the Jeremy Ford restaurant that opened at the resort and has drawn diners driving in from well outside the Middle Keys just to eat there. It's a fitting backdrop. The awards celebrate the unglamorous, essential businesses that keep the city running day to day, held at the one address in the Middle Keys currently getting national food press for the opposite reason.
By the time you read this, the Best Beard trophy is either already decided or about to be. So is Best Hugger, Best Celebrity Pet, and every other category on a ballot that's grown by roughly eight new or reshuffled categories in recent years as residents keep suggesting things the paper hadn't thought to ask about yet. The category list itself changes annually because the town keeps finding new things worth arguing about.
Why This Ballot Is the Real Census
Most towns get measured by the metrics visible from outside: median home price, tourist counts, restaurant reviews. Best of Marathon measures something else. It's a crowdsourced, self-reported inventory of who the town actually depends on, updated every year by the only people qualified to answer, the ones who live here and have an opinion about their pool guy. A city directory tells you a business exists. A sixteen-year voting record, with international turnout and a beard-measuring subcommittee, tells you which ones people actually love.
If you're already in Marathon, you know this instinctively, you've probably voted, and you're probably still annoyed about last year's outcome in at least one category. If you're watching this town from somewhere else and wondering what daily life here is actually like, this is closer to the truth than any listing photo. It's a place small enough that a hug can win an award and connected enough that the vote for it comes in from five continents.
If that combination sounds like the kind of place you'd want to call home, Ally Kelley works this stretch of the Middle Keys every day and would be glad to talk through what it actually looks like to live here, not just visit. Request a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
