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.