First Day out in Florida

Day One: 22.25 miles 4:30 hours

Today we paddled on the Silver River.  It was beautiful!  The Silver is a spring fed river and you paddle upstream to where the  spring originates.  The water was deep aqua color, and very clear all the way to the bottom.  A few times in the boat I thought we would scuff over a log only to realize I couldn’t even touch it with my paddle.  We weren’t in the boat about 15 minutes when we saw the first gator.  It was a good sized one and we drifted right near him to nab a couple photos.  The wildlife was amazing.  You could easily see big fish in the clear water.  There are tons of large fish including the Gar fish which can be 5 feet long with a really long snout.   As we got closer to the spring we saw some monkeys hanging out/playing in the trees on the rivers edge.  No one really knows why they are there, but a colony of Rhesus monkeys is alive and thriving in the state park. There are a couple of rumors floating around the paddlers on how the monkeys found this home, I am going with the Tarzan movie idea myself mainly cause that one seems to come up the most.  We made it upstream to where the river originates and it was a deep hole and you could easily see the bottom. Built around this spring was a pretty large amusement park which was kind of strange to paddle into. The park had some pretty nice foliage and glass bottom boats for the tourists to check out the crystal clear waters.  We paddled back to the put in for a total of 2:10.

 After a snack and nice break at the put in we paddled downstream on a different river that branched off of the Silver River, we can’t remember the name but it was different looking for sure. The waters on this were much greener and a little less deep.  We were a bit fatigued but we were happy with how we were moving the boat.  It was out first time in our pro boat since the Charles last year.  We had great day with a big group of boats.  We saw tons of beautiful birds in this area and tons of large turtles, sort of like painted turtles on steroids. We also caught a little baby alligator sunning himself on a log in this area.  

This last picture above are the craziest tadpoles I haver ever seen!!!! The thing was as big as our frogs at home so I can only image what kind of frog it turns into. Yikes!!!!