NOrth

Peanut butter and sardines for dinner is Pam's way of letting me know this trip is over. We will haul the boat out and start the drive home tomorrow. I plan to go up through South Carolina for a change of scenery.

exploring off the river

I saw several rivers and creeks on the chart that go nowhere, but look like they might be interesting. A lot of them are connected. I picked an opening little north of Hontoon and we started up it. The whole place is a National Wildlife Refuge. We made our way up through places so tight that we could touch the trees on both sides of the boat. The VHF antenna collected spanish moss on it. We traveled through places a larger boat wouldn't dare try. Some streams were less than 3' deep, and more than once I looked out my side door at submerged logs that we missed hitting by dumb luck.
When we finally came to a place we could go no futher, we were about 15 miles off the St Johns. As much of a wilderness as you'll find in Florida. We were on, or very close to places named Mud Lake, Shell Creek, Daisy Lake, Highland Canal, Zeigler Dead River, Blue Peter Lake, Norris Dead River, Gator Lake, Scoggin Lake, & Lake Woodruff.
On the way in, we passed some sort of compound with an interesting statue. I'm sure I've seen that figure somewhere before. Perhaps on another planet.
As you might imagine, alligators were everywhere. I was going to say they are ubiquitous, but I can't spell that.
We also saw these two spooners.
We're anchored in another oxbow tonight. As I was dropping the anchor, two 10' gators circled the boat. They're already croaking back and forth. My "gatorese" is a little rusty, but I think they're daring each other to try to climb our anchor line.

Lettuce

We stopped back at Hontoon Island and as promised, our new friends, Tom and Joan brought us lettuce from their garden in Jacksonville. Made a delicious chef's salad for dinner. The photo is of Tom and Pam.
The dock here tonight is a boat show for small cruisers. In addition to us, there's a C-Dory 25 and a Nordic Tug 26. We all toured each other's boats, and some other passers by joined in.

Ranger Bob

We had a great lunch and visit with Bob and Eve at the Swamp House Grill on the river at DeBary.
We the went up the Wekiva River. A small, winding, shallow stream. I sometimes run only one engine when going very slow and that turned out to be fortunate today as we hit a log with the engine that was off. No bent prop.
Tracy, this is the river Uncle Bobby took you on. And that's the gator you saw.
Like a lot of the river here there's cypress swamp along the sides.

Lake Monroe

We were anchored last night in a small oxbow near Blue Springs. It was hard to sleep for all the racket outside our boat. There were billions and billions of tree frogs. We were surrounded by owls hooting at one another. And of course the alligators. The gators have a guttural growl that sounds a little like a bear growling.

This morning, we watched several gators cruising around the boat.

We left our anchorage, and headed South up the river.  I'm not sure if there's more gators here on the south part of the river, or if there's more out on weekdays or if maybe we now know where to look for them.  But along the way, we saw hunderts and hunderts of them.

Just north of the entrance to Lake Monroe and the town of Sanford, we had to contact the railroad bridgetender and ask him to raise the bridge to let us through. This one is normally closed.

Lake Monroe is the 11th largest lake in Florida.  (Lake Monroe is Indiana's largest lake.)  The one in Florida is 9450 acres and the deepest spot is 7'.  We're staying in Monroe Harbor Marina tonight.  (Not Free--$1.00 per foot and $3.00 for electricity.)  It's right on the edge of old downtown Sanford so we walked through the town, had the obligatory ice cream, and went back in for dinner tonight.  Had a great meal at a place called "Two Blonds and a Shrimp."

This is as far south as we go.  The river is not navigable south of Lake Monroe.

Pam called her uncle who lives in DeBary, FL.  They are to meet us for lunch tomorrow along the river at the Swamp House Grill.

Bigun

I thought I had posted enough gator photos. But here's one more.

Today, while coming back from the springs in our rubber boat, we were cruising along slowly about 10' off the shoreline. As we came to a small little indentation in the weeds, I had my camera in my hand thinking I might take a photo of the herron nest. Just as we got to the opening, we came face to face with the little guy in this photo. He must have thought we had his escape route blocked because he jumped up and ran straight towards us. He hit the water going much faster than you'd think something that big could move. I didn't know gators moved so fast or that a rubber boat with a 2 hp outboard at full throttle would seem so slow.

I didn't know I had his picture until I downloaded the photos from the camera. He was quite a bit longer than our rubber boat. I would guess him to be 14 feet long.

Blue springs state park

It stormed all night. One boater said there were 1400 lightning strikes per minute. Daytime temps have been in the high 80's and nights in the 60's.

People in the boat next to us at Hontoon rented a car to go home to Jacksonville a few days. Left their boat at the Hontoon dock. Before they left, they gave us their vegatables, eggs, etc. Said to stop by on our way back and they'd bring us some lettuce from their garden. Everyone I've met cruising on the rivers has been extremely friendly. (With the exception of that unpleasant fellow in Mt Vernon, IN.) When I came down the Illinois River people would give us the key to their pick up truck to drive into town and fill our gas cans.

Blue springs state park is just up the river. There's no where to dock so we anchored in an oxbow nearby and took the dink over. They've built a boardwalk back to the spring. Probably so we wouldn't encounter rattlesnakes. I wasn't worried--I wore my snakeproof flip flops.
The water in the spring is 73 degrees year round. Manatees stay there in the winter months. None today.
The photo of the spring shows a hole about 10 feet below the surface. It goes down 110 feet. They let scuba divers go down in it. None today.

Trouble

Once again, I'm in trouble. It seems I posted a music video on my blog without permission from the artist. Some sort of copywright infringement. In addition, each time someone clicks on it, I owe him royalties. What a mess.

To make matters worse, I've only found wi-fi once on this trip. That's when I uploaded the song. I have to peck out most of my blogs on my cell phone keyboard. Now I can't remove the song from my blog and the royalties keep building up.

Please don't click on that song.

Birds

It's been a great trip for wild life. Especially birds. Osprey are everywhere. We hardly pass a marker on the river that doesn't have an Osprey nest. We've seen several eagles, lots of Egrets and tonight, we're anchored near a couple of Great Blue Herron nests.

We have a problem at home with too many Canada Geese in our back yard. Down here along the river, we've seen backyard Wild Turkeys, Peacocks, Sandhill Cranes, and many other species.

Still at Hontoon Island

I guess we're famous now. People are making up songs about our adventures. Sounds a little like Gilligan's Island. Thanks Chad.

The weather forecast says strong thunderstorms this afternoon and tonight, so we decided to stay here another night. Hontoon Island is a state park only accessable by boat. They run a little pontoon ferry back and forth to the mainland. It's powered by an electric outboard.

There's a "path" through the island to an old indian shell mound. We walked that direction, found the mound, and didn't get lost. Along the way, we came upon this snake. When we got back, we asked the park ranger what kind of snake it is. He called it a ground rattler but I think it's also called a pigmy rattler. Meaner than the big rattlers and the venom is more deadly. (Pam had to walk in front the rest of the way.)

Rubber Boat Song

Son-in-law Chad made up a song about our rubber boat adventures.

MORE GATORS

Hontoon Island

We're staying tonight at the Hontoon Island State Park. My free dock record is blemished. It' $20 to stay here. Includes elec, water and a nice bathouse with showers.

After we checked in, we took the dinghy on a 10 mile cruise up the Dead River and then into the Snake River. (Which I hoped was named for it's twisty path - not it's inhabitants.) The chart says the Snake is "un-navigable". The photos show some of the plants, but about half way through, there was a tree that had fallen across most of the water. What was left was covered with some sort of vine stuff that I thought we could push through. We blasted into it, and right up on top of the stuff. The motor wouldn't go down in it so I tried the oars. The vine stuff held on to the oars and we couldn't move. The water was warm, but I just couldn't convince Pam to get out and push. I was finally able to pull on some tree limbs and get us across.

We saw hunderts of alligators. Some photos of them will be in the next post.

BLUE CREEK

After we anchored, we took our dinghy up Blue Cteek in search of alligators. Some might think it foolhardy to seek out alligators in a small blow up rubber boat. However, some others might recall that I once had an alligator for a pet. I had a close relationship with my gator, and as a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I could communicate two words to him. "Friend" and "food."

So when we saw a gator that was longer than our blow up rubber boat, I had no fear because of my relationship with my old pet. I would just signal "friend" and we'd be fine.

Pam, of course, doubted both my ability to communicate with gators as well as my ability to remember the difference between "friend" and "food". She also brought up in detail the circumstances of my pet gator's untimely demise, involving an explosion, a refrigerator and a dog. If there was to be any relationship today, she expected revenge for a lost relative.

We did see several gators. Some longer than our dinghy. But there was no retaliation from the relatives.

LAKE GEORGE

A couple of guys walked outon the dock this morning and asked us where we'd been and where we were headed. They suggested we go up the Olawaha River. It comes from Silver Springs over near Ocala. In the old days, people from up north would ride the train to Palatka, then board a paddle wheeler for a trip up to Silver Springs. The Oklawawa is no longer maintained for navigation and there's a dam before Silver Springs. We went up several miles. There's no houses or any sign that anyone's ever been there before. Cypress trees covered with spanish moss, lily pads and alligators. Nice side trip. This place is more like the Everglades than the Everglades.

Lake George is the second largest lake in Florida. It's 11 miles long and 5 miles wide. We stopped at SilverGlen Springs, on the west side of the lake. The most popular destination on the St Johns. We had planned on spending the night there, but it looked like "cocktail cove" back home. The water was crystal clear and had it not been so crowded, I'm.sure we would had stayed.

So we went on across Lake George and anchored behind Morrison Island.

WALATKA

Stopped at the FREE city dock in Watakla.

Walked into town and found the Maritime Museum. It's a building full of wooden boats. It's not a great idea for me to go in places like that. Gives me ideas. I've owned several wooden boats. A sailboat from the 1930's. A 59 Century Coronado, and a 1938 Chris Craft barrel back triple cockpit that I owned twice.

Most of the boats in the museum were built by a man named Speas. He took blocks of wood and then glued them together. Then he sanded them smooth. He would find old motors and then build a boat around the motor. All of the boats were built since 1992. His son restores old wood boats so there were also some classic runabouts.

Palatka (again)

We stayed at the FREE Palatka City Dock again last night. Hard to beat the free water and electricity. And this morning, I called the Parks Dept and they sent over a guy to pump us out. FREE ! They have everything except showers. So we set up our own shower stall on the back of Tonic.

I spoke to a guy walking his dog on the dock. We chatted for a while and then before we left, he came back and gave us a bag full of grapefruit from his tree.

We've encountered 2 railroad bridges. They're up unless there's a train coming. (or as was the case in Jacksonville, the attendent is out to lunch. We saw him walking back down the tracks with his lunch bag.)

Saw some more gators today on our way to Walaka. As you might guess, I found the FREE Wataka city dock to spend tonight. No electric or water but a nice dock. We walked into town to see the Maritime Museum. Next post.

bridges

I tried to get photos of the lights on the bridges in Jacksonville. However, I must still have the shakes. One of the bridges lifts straight up for boat traffic.

We left Jacksonville this morning, and headed back south to Palatka. A 50 mile journey.
Plan to spend more time on the southern half.