ssh fails 60 percent of the time Oo

I am creating a droplet like this : new_droplet=$(curl -X POST “https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets”
-d’{“name”:“laminarghost”,“region”:“nyc3”,“size”:“s-1vcpu-2gb”,“image”:“ubuntu-18-04-x64”,“ssh_keys”:[‘$SSH_ID’],“user_data”:null}’
-H “Authorization: Bearer $DO_TOKEN”
-H “Content-Type: application/json”)

after extracting some item from the JSON I am using the following to move a folder and substructure to the droplet:

tar -vczf - * | ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new root@${new_droplet_ip} tar -xzf - -C /opt/

it starts listing files and then stops. 30 percent of the time it announces that the key has been added to known hosts. and proceeds through the rest of the script

the rest of the time it returns ssh: connect to host IP address here port 22: Connection refused tar: -: Wrote only 4096 of 10240 bytes tar: Child returned status 141 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

the ssh takes (15 seconds? ish )to respond, I suspect sometimes it’s longer and times out?

comments and suggestions appreciated