Live Oak Blues What happens.

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I wasn’t even going to write about this outing. I had done it before and this trip was blissfully uneventful. I did finally notice that Red-winged Blackbirds love bullrush, but that wasn’t going to be enough of the good stuff for a blog entry.


That is, until the very end. I had drifted about a quarter of mile offshore and was turning around to locate the canal and head back to the truck. From far off I heard an airboat–the only one on the lake this morning (alligator season is over)–and eventually I saw it. It seemed to be headed right for me, but it was too far away to tell. As I got closer to the canal, the boat corrected its trajectory to where I was paddling. Now in the sunlight, you can pick up Big Blue from a long way off, so there was no doubt he saw me.


Before I knew it he was right up on me. Hyacinth stands line this part of the shore and you have to head between them to get to the canal. The airboat cut through the back of these and was about 25 feet from my port side as I entered the canal. Airboaters wear ear protection for a reason, and I had none. I decided I would not hurry in the least to get back to my truck, so I paddled a few strokes here and there, would drift, look up into the trees, and then paddle again. For the entire length of the canal, this guy stayed about 10 to 15 feet off my stern, juicing his boat just enough to stay that distance back. He followed me all the way up to the dock and then turned around and headed back out to the lake.

Since he had no discernible reason for entering the canal, I can only conclude that he did so to harass me, however “subtly.” I am sure he had me pegged as a Quiet Lakes supporter–and I unabashedly am. But I have interacted with numerous airboaters on this lake and others and none of them have behaved like this.


The more I thought about it, the more pissed I got and the more I wanted to let him know that I knew what he was doing. There’s still some testosterone rocking around this body after all. So I racked my boat and headed over to the only other place airboats can put in…and there he was pulling up to the dock. I drove up far enough so that he could see my blue boat atop my truck, sat awhile, took some pictures, and eventually left. I have a standing policy never to confront armed men.


I’ve been paranoid before, as anyone who knows me will attest, but in this case I think I may have a good argument. Nevertheless, I think next week will be a Newnan’s week for me and my boat. I plan to be a prominent presence there for a long time, airboats or no airboats.


Update: See comments below from John MacLaren. I’m glad to be wrong about this.

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Using the same starting point as yesterday, I went east, under the I-75 bridge, and up a river that bore no resemblance to the one I paddled yesterday. While the river west of I-75 was as knotted as a tangle of hair, the east was broad and imminently navigable and devoid of most of the features that give the west its personality.

Indeed, the element that riveted me to the point of obsession was the steam coming off the river. In some sections, I was unable to see where I was paddling. All my pictures from today have this steam in them somewhere. But nothing prepared me for the section where seemingly random columns of steam twisted straight out of the water. Are there mini-springs down below? Why do they twist like little waterspouts, often six feet or higher into the air? Why, as I approached them, did they disappear? I predict a call or two to my scientist friends on this issue.

Another question I need to pose to them is where do the alligators go when it gets cold? I have not seen one since the weather has turned. In fact, aside from the occasional hawk criss-crossing over the river, the only bird I saw (I heard plenty, however) was a solitary white egret. Is this this a Santa Fe thing or a weather thing? Speaking of which, this coolness has gotten my camping juices flowing. I yearn to disappear down a river soon and camp along its banks for a few days. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

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At my age, it is a relief to know that I can still make myself available for “life lessons.” For instance, I learned this today: no matter how fun, small, and “cute” a rapids appears downriver, it can be an absolute bastard upriver. At current levels, at least, the Santa Fe has two of these between I-75 and where the river goes underground. Performing the back-and-forth, vigorous rocking motion know to all kayakers along with liberal use of the paddle as a lever, I managed to make it up the smaller rapids coming back. But after the second, larger rapids pinned me broadside between two rocks, allowing my cockpit to fill quickly with water, I decided there was no way out but to exit the boat and drag it upriver.

This trip was a whole lot more work than I expected. Downriver, the water is constantly draining through this or that suck hole or fissure and the current is anything but consistent. Couple that with the many felled trees that have dropped like so many Lincoln Logs across the river and you’ve got a workout. On the other hand, I once again found myself exclaiming, “Okay, this is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.” Click on the picture to your right here (go ahead). You cannot paddle through a vista like this and not be changed.

The pre-Rise Santa Fe is famously twisty and this part of it absolutely was. At times I would wind my way through a series of switchbacks only to find that I had merely cirumnavigated an island that put me a mere 25 yards or so downriver. I often wondered on the way back if I would get lost or not–which is a strange thing to wonder on a river that flows in only one direction. For such an isolated place, however, I was never completely out of earshot of I-75.

Down near the suckhole, where I took a few revolutions around the whirlpool, I saw four wild turkeys on the wing crossing the river. They were such a surprise to me that I had to call a friend afterwards to verify that turkeys could really fly that gracefully. By the time I made it back to the truck, I was beat up and exhausted, but that was not a bad thing. It is good to have a river beat you up every once and a while.

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My days of paddling in shorts and a t-shirt appear to be over for a while. By the time I put in, the temperature had climbed to 55 and the air was so clear I could see the edges of leaves many yards downriver. All the humidity had been relegated to a puffy mist right over the surface of the river. In fact, the water itself was surprisingly warm.

This part of the Santa Fe is deceptive. It appears to be wide and navigable, but the levels are so low that my boat dragged the bottom the entire time. Even fallen trees of moderate thickness stopped me in mid-paddle…and there were many fallen trees. As portage in 50-degree weather wearing shorts and a t-shirt was not an option, this was a relatively short outing.

My descriptive powers fail to represent the alien beauty of this part of the river. The banks are high and steep and expose the ornate networks of the tree roots that line them. The tannin is so highly concentrated here that the water is black and opaque even when it is 6 inches deep. I saw no animals whatsoever here and only the occasional congregation of water skimmers betrayed that this river supported any life at all.


Yet evidence did exist on the banks and shore in the form of trash. I don’t want this to become a refrain in my blog, but if someone is drawn to a river or lake or gulf for whatever reason, why then would this person sully the place that attracted them in the first place? Perhaps I am sensitized to this issue from my years of cleaning up the debris my teenager leaves around my house, but it truly does pollute one’s experience in the water. Clearly, a trash bag will now become part of my paddling gear.


Tomorrow: The Santa Fe experiment continues at O’Leno.

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I am spent. The Gulf will do that. The path we took was only six miles total, but it was a tough six, against the wind, against the current, facing the sun, contending with airboat wakes, paddling into false thruways, and so on. By the time we got back to the truck, I’d had a full day.

Finding islands in the Gulf is tricky when you’re sitting a foot off the water. Horizons tend to blend and, as its name suggests, all is horizontal. Thankfully, a paddling couple has lovingly put together an excellent guide with simple maps that makes it nearly impossible to get lost. Deer Island was exactly where they reported it to be.


The island itself is as unspoiled as anything can be in Florida. By our reckoning, only one house exists there and everything has been allowed to grow as it was intended. Nevertheless, when we pulled up to stretch on the beach there, I found an empty gallon wine bottle and an old cup, which I dutifully transported back to the mainland. The only possible excuse for such neglect is if they did indeed thrown down a gallon of wine, then remembering to take it with them was probably too much to expect.

A cool, stiff wind stayed with us the entire time, and strangely it seemed to want to turn my bow out to the Gulf. On the other side, the sun baked from above and, as it reflected off the water, from below. Yes, it was a temperature sammich with me in the middle. I am fried to a fare the well, but it’s the kind of exhaustion honestly earned.


Tomorrow: Gonna drive north until I hit the Santa Fe and then I’m gonna put in.

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That’s it, right there on the left. That’s where the Santa Fe River comes out of the ground after tunneling under for some three miles. Supposedly it brings with it a lot more water when it emerges then it has when it goes underground. Such a phenomenon also brings with it apocryphal stories of children getting sucked into the aquifer and then expelled months later, three miles downriver. I realized when I got there that I had been there before and the rise itself was frankly a little anticlimactic.

When I left the house this morning, it might as well have been nighttime–there was no hint of the sunrise and the clouds hung low. By the time I put in at 441, it was not much brighter, but the subdued lighting made everything  hallucinatory. I imagined faces in the shadows of submerged logs and ancient cobwebs in the muted grey-greens of the Spanish Moss. No appreciable difference exists between upstream and downstream here, and yet I imagined that my kayak was sucking down into the water as I approached and came back from River Rise. Perhaps the river really was rising here?

The lack of flow I did not imagine, however, and I tested that hypothesis by reclining for 30 minutes about halfway back. I have figured out that if I prop up one of the wings of my PFD, it serves as an excellent pillow. My boat did not move at all the whole time. I came very close, in fact, to falling asleep before I decided I needed to get back and begin the day the rest of the world was beginning.


The most surprising thing about River Rise was running into a friend, out there in the middle of nowhere, co-working with a co-worker. They know a completely different river than I do, and I felt envious of their knowledge. I paddle in relative ignorance out here, but I must admit that I love discovering the natural world as if I were the first person ever to see it.

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The neighborhood cat pisses on my kayak at night. I don’t blame her: it is big, blue and sits right in the middle of her territory. The problem is I don’t realize it until I put in and the water “re-activates” the piss and then the smell is with me for the duration. Turns out it was perfect potpourri for what was a nasty outing.

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Nasty isn’t always bad. For instance, I loved the nastiness of the choppy, Gatorade-green water and the spray that soaked me. Hell, I even liked the nasty vertigo I felt when I closed my eyes and tried to float. I did not, however, like the nasty 40oz bottles, or the cigarette boxes, or the sandwich wrappers, or the fishing tackle bags that always grace any part of the west shore of Newnan’s where it opens up to the road. I am tempted to make a laminated sign or something to tell them to clean their shit up, but what good would it do? If people enjoy sitting in trash when they fish, who am I to stop them?

I was determined to get to the geographical middle of the lake and float, and I kinda did. The getting to the middle was no problem, but the floating was. When I leave it in charge of things, my boat likes to orient itself so that it takes the waves broadside and, since some of the waves were taller than the out-of-the-water part of my boat, I got soaked. This was clearly not going to be a meditative outing.


No matter, I would just sit here and welcome any of the three storms approaching Newnan’s, just like my hero John Muir did when he lashed himself to the top of a tree during a thunderstorm. I mean, it’s not at all insane to be the tallest thing in a 7,500 acre lake during a thunder and lightning, right? But all the storms stayed around the edge of the lake, so I waited for the Gainesville Area Rowers to slide past during their practice before I pointed my boat to shore and paddled in.

Whenever I am on this side of Newnan’s, I use the lily pads as a landmark (watermark?) to get back, except this time the wind had blown them all together, so that at one point I was paddling through nothing but lily pads. I pretty sure it is not okay to do this ecologically, but I had to get through them. Lily pads, please accept my apology. For penance, I will bring a trash bag next time I come back.

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If I do anything for a week or more, I can’t go a day without it. So by 6PM today, I was jonesing to get in some water, having enjoyed the decadence of sleeping into until 7AM this morning. Lucky for me, this little jewel is right down the road from me in Waldo. After an hour of paddling, drifting, and watching the clouds gather over the blackest water I’ve ever seen, I fell in love. I don’t know its history, don’t even know if it’s man-made or natural, but if I ever find a house on this lake, I’ll move heaven and earth to move there. It is silent, moody, traffic free, and big enough to actually be a lake.

The maps claim there’s a canal leading to Little Lake Santa Fe, and I suppose there is one, after a fashion, but it seems only to be navigable by reptiles and birds. No matter, I simply paddled to the middle of the lake, kicked back, and watched the storm clouds gather over the south shore. Even the sound of the trucks downshifting on 301 fit in somehow. I regretted having to paddle back to the truck.

By the time I got there, a local man was pacing back and forth along the canal. He walked over to where I was pulling my boat out and asked me if I had caught anything. I thought the absence of any fishing equipment might have precluded the question, but I realized soon enough it was just a pretext for his telling me his views about various unjust local, state, and federal laws. I thought I knew where this was going and braced myself for the inevitable anti-Obama tirade. Yet he stopped me in my tracks when he described his worst fear: that the Republicans would be put back in charge. After a lifetime of having my easy assumptions debunked, you’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. No doubt I will run into him again when I return to this lake.

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I did the Silver River this morning. Yeah, that’s right, the whole thing, five miles up and five miles down. Of course, at least three of the downstream miles were the sweetest drifting this side of Huck Finn, but I more than earned my keep paddling upstream. Oh, and my $300 Garmin GPS fell in the water and died, because I thought it would be “cool” to see where I was on the river, and where I was turned out to be a place where GPSs can get irreparably soaked.

The Silver is a heavily trafficked river, so I put in as early as I could get down there and was the first one in the water. I didn’t meet a soul until I was on my way back downstream, and the only motorized conveyance I saw was a pontoon boat straight out of “The African Queen,” complete with ladies in safari hats. I hid in a little cove until they passed.


I took a half day off from work to do the whole thing, because I’ve aborted mid-trip so many times on the Silver that I was determined to make it all the way to the glass-bottom boats if it killed me. I’m tore up from the floor up, but it was worth it: I’ve seen every anhinga, cormorant, ibis, wood duck, and turtle in the state of Florida and many of its finest gators; I know what it’s like now to be completely stationary from the waist down for four hours; and I had a day of paddling so vigorous, I had just enough strength to get the kayak back on top of my truck.

Waxing philosophical about paddling is a fool’s game and I try and avoid the facile stuff, but drifting for an hour without touching my paddle, letting the current spin my boat around as only it knew how, was nothing short of prayer–even with the GPS emitting its electronic death rattle in the back compartment. To know the birds by their calls, enveloped in the white noise of the cicadas, to feel the river actually lift your boat as the aquifer belches up a fresh supply of water, to begin to know a plant or tree by its smell, well, that’s a sense of spirit I don’t believe I’ve ever had.


Tomorrow: Who knows?

R.I.P.

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Feckin’ Hydrilla! Is it edible? If so, we’re in business in North Central Florida. It’s either rotting or fresh and thriving in every lake I’ve been in, especially Orange and Lochloosa. It wraps around your paddle or propeller or whatever you use for forward progress and, yes, it is invasive and despised by nearly everyone. How invasive? Well, all our hydrilla comes from folks who dumped their aquariums in the lakes in the ’60s. Highly adaptable, if you have it on your boat in one lake, it will gladly take root in another as soon as you put in, even if it has dried out a little.

I got a late start, which meant I was paddling into the sun the whole way out. I am privileged just to be able to paddle, I know, but this was blinding and unpleasant, made more so by the airboat nearby. The wind, though, was lovely and brisk and the anhinga posed for me without complaint. In fact, the more I spend time with the birds out on the waters, the more distinctive their personalities become. The Great Blues are old men playing shuffleboard with their polyester trousers hiked up to their nipples; the white egrets are pre-pubescent head cases trying to figure out how to open their lockers at school; and the anhingas are ancient gods, wiser than all of us.

It is rare that I don’t feel much better after a paddle than before, but today I was exhausted and petulant and felt like this whole enterprise of daily paddling was a self-indulgent whim that I would tire of soon. I realize I am keeping this blog for me (literally, as I am often the only one who reads it. Damn you, Google Stats!) but there is a strong part of me that hopes it is of some good to others. /self-pity


Well-needed day off tomorrow. I need to clean my boat and do some readjustments and, well, sleep a little.