THE 42ND WILDHOG CANOE RACE 2019

I'm not sure how many times I have completed the Wildhog Canoe Race on the beautiful Waccasassa River.

I raced solo when I was younger and the kids were too young to come along ... thinking maybe 3 times in that era.

Then when my girls were old enough, I took each one at least once. On one of those adventures with my little Emma, we stove in the bow of our canoe on a submerged log early in the race, ... and took on water for the rest of the adventure. 

It was a mix of constant paddling and bailing for about 14 more miles of twisty river.

All 3 kids, Katy, Emma, and Raymie got their turn with Dad and most got two.  
On Raymie's first trip, he was a little guy and totally useless as a paddler, but he added a wonderful humorous twist to the race with his nonstop questions and commentary.

Later, as a very strong athletic teenager, he helped propel the two of us to 2nd place in the parent/child division.

I did the race solo a few times more after the kids grew up, but then about 7 years ago, I discovered obstacle course racing and I let the Wildhog Canoe Race slip off my "to do list".

I almost did that this year too, but at the last moment, ... I signed up.
With a fishing kayak (NOT the best kayak for this race!) and being 61, I had to compete in the Men's 55+ Kayak division.

That was fine with me.
My thinking was ..."How many fit old guys can there be?"

Turns out ... the answer to that question is 5 (counting me).
Five of us in the Senior Men's Kayak division ... although I swear there were only 3 of us at the start line when our wave was launched.

The Waccasassa at this point is very skinny and twisty with a variety of obstacles, most of them logs. The final few miles cuts through lime rock and much of this has been solution eroded into sharp edges. 

This year the water level was up and we all avoided most of those boat and knee scrapers!

I put together a short video of some of the obstacles. The video represents just a tiny bit of the race course.





At the end of the race, about 20 feet from the official finish line, there is a log across the river.

Every participant and their boat must cross over the log or earn a 5-minute penalty to their time.

This log (some years there are 2 logs!) is purely for the spectators' enjoyment. The picture below is me about to go over that log.  (Thanks to Wanda Johnson for my photo!!)

I got a cool T-shirt, a free BBQ lunch, a huge thumb blister, and a new cell phone out the WildHog Canoe Race.

It seems I put too much faith in an old phone dry case that I have owned for a very long time ... too long apparently.

At the only stop I made during the race, a 7-minute beaching to tip the kayak and dump water out ... I discovered my beloved Pixel was in a bag of water, not dry.

Fifteen miles, my time was 2:47:21 and 7 of those minutes were the few minutes ashore.

4th place in a field of 5.

Very fun day and I will be back!

See you on the water.

RODMAN RESERVOIR, PART 3 ... Crushing it.

The last time we talked, I was paddling through the stump forest in the historic Oklawaha River channel. 

A cyclic drawdown of the large and artificial Rodman Reservoir had exposed both the old river path and the stumps of a forest long gone.

The machine in the photo above (a photo from Google images) is "The Crusher"... or "The Monster" ... 300 tons of forest smashing steel. It was much bigger than it appears in that distant photo. On Google, there is a photo of a girl standing at the foot of it for scale ... go seek it out.

The machine was built for the express purpose of both knocking down the river floodplain forest and smashing the trees into the ground so securely that they would just stay there and rot when Rodman was flooded by the dam.

Plans look so sparkly on a drawing board, don't they?

Once the forest was flattened and the river backed up behind the new dam, the trees began popping up until Rodman Reservoir was a minefield of floating logs.

This made boating in the reservoir a risky proposition for a long time and even today, logs still create navigation challenges.

So, while on one side of the barge canal, the ghost forest exists as vertical, broken, but still rooted stumps like we've seen in the earlier posts, ...on the other side all the trees are angled or horizontal.

Even with 7 more feet of water above this area at "full pool", plenty of these logs could be an issue for motorized boats.

Rodman is also heavy with exotic, invasive aquatic plants like hydrilla, and water hyacinths among the Crusher smashed logs.

They contribute vast amounts of organic matter to the reservoir which creates much of the black muck on the bottom.

But what about this strange crushed side of the canal?

The flattened side of the barge canal was very shallow due to the drawdown so even in a kayak, I found myself constantly steering around submerged logs, hyacinth clogs, and dead ends.

There were beaucoup grackles perching, flitting, and hunting "things" down among the floating hyacinths.

I know they're just grackles, but I like their personality and sleekness.

They were good company.

I'm a fan of anhingas too and this one let me drift pretty close before lifting off.

The crushed forest.

Looking out over it, I pause and drain the water with my imagination, let ... or better yet ... help the forest come back with some good restoration plans, and imagine ahead a hundred years to a restored Oklawaha with a maturing forest where now there are only dead stumps.

I'm not sure the long view is very popular right now in an era of instant gratification and over development. 

I know this, we would have no Yellowstone or Everglades today if folks in the past had not taken the long term view long ago.

Folks in the late 1800's, fighting to establish National Parks ... they were thinking of me before my grandparents were born.

Question is ... do we still do that?

Thing is, I don't want my future great-grandchildren to see the lower Oklawaha like it is now with an artificial eutrophying Rodman Reservoir.

I want them to see the springs buried beneath this artificial lake and a mature cypress forest outlining the curving path of the Oklawaha River.

And yeah, they may have to work a little harder to catch a big bass than anglers in Rodman do today.

Fish in a river are not a captive audience.

I'm okay with that.

There will still be plenty of fish with a free river, as there is today in the flowing Oklawaha upstream from Rodman.

And there will still be awesome critters like the banded watersnake below.

He kept popping up to breathe while I was parked, imagining the dam gone and the river system restoring itself.

The first time he popped up, I thought, "Dang it, I missed him!"

I sat for a bit, and in a minute or two he popped up again ... and I missed him again.

So, I let the kayak drift a little closer to the sunken log that he seemed to be working for crayfish or other tasties.

And ... Bazinga!

There he was.

Gotcha!

I like this last photo of episode 3, because it's a nice little sandwich of the crushed forest bog clog side, the barge canal with a bass boat zooming through, the stump forest on the Oklawaha channel side, and, last but not least, the upland forest beyond.

In the final episode of Rodman Exposed, I chase the Eagle.

RODMAN DRAWDOWN PART 2: Life Among The Dead.

So, if I remember correctly, the last time we chatted here, we were kayaking around Rodman Reservoir during the most recent drawdown.

This photo is what drawdowns are all about ... exposing the mucky bottom to the air and Sun to reduce the black, gooey, organic muck that builds up in lakes over time. 

The lake bottom above will soon be under about 7 feet of water when the drawdown is over and Rodman is allowed to refill.

Flat featureless lake bottom is not all that interesting or rich in critters of the macro kind, so I turned my kayak towards the dead forest. The water here was alive with small fish, the logs loaded with birds, and the shallow depth and submerged logs kept the high powered bass boats out in the old barge channel and beyond.

Pretty kayakalicious.

These ibis found one of the gajillion log islands a good place for a preen in the warm sun. The strip of blue water in the right background is the barge canal. The water where I am at that moment is about 1 foot deep or less and clogged with logs.

Sort of a log-clog.

If the lake has been drawn down the full 7 feet described on the FWC website, a lot of these stumps would be almost fully submerged at full pool... a fact that makes Rodman a pretty robust largemouth bass fishery.

The excellent fishing available at Rodman is one of the arguments for keeping the dam and the reservoir.

I love fishing, but I disagree with this viewpoint.

I don't think that fact trumps outweighs the value of restoring a wild river and the original ecosystem of the Oklawaha.

There will still be fish.

This kayak voyage and this dead forest was very nostalgic for me.

Back in 1975, as a 17 year old, my buddy Kevin and I replicated a canoe trip that my big brother Terry had done a few years before.

Our goal was to paddle the Oklawaha from its headwaters to its mouth at the St. Johns River. I posted about this on Pure Florida in 2008, but a bunch of you weren't paying attention back then.

This would be a great time to click on this link and check out the story. It's a good one and 100% true.

In 1975, Rodman Dam and the reservoir were only about 7 years old and these cypress stumps and broken trunks that appear in this post were still very tall, mostly intact dead trees.

I remember their height distinctly thanks to the terrific lightning storm that was exploding around Kevin and I as we semi-desperately paddled our asses off in the submerged Oklawaha channel. It was the tall, dead, lightning-hungry forest on either side of us that kept us in the river and not lost among the drowned forest.

Somehow that evening, the lightning chose trees away from our immediate location ... or maybe we were just paddling lightning fast via the power of adrenalin.

Now, decades of Florida weather have shortened these trees to nothing more than tall stumps.

Stumps that offer pretty good hunting grounds for wading birds of all kinds.

A Snowy Egret hunting Gambusia minnows among the logs. Gambusia were everywhere in these shallows.

Not the world's greatest Gambusia (aka "Mosquito Fish") photograph, but I did snag one of the mutant males in the shot. These black and white fish were easy to spot and there were a lot of them. It's a mutation that only shows in the males. One study I read showed a slight survival advantage for the speckled males over the silver "normal" males when faced with their usual predators such as bass, crayfish, and dragonfly nymphs.

They seem like a beacon to wading birds to me though.

 Ibis among the dead.

The wading birds also walk around on the mats of green vegetation (hyacinths, pennywort, hydrilla) while they hunt.

You would think there would be an alligator around every corner, but I only saw 2 the entire day.

Of course it was a warm spring day, and a work day, not a basking day for gators.

This little blue let me get only so close before launching.

This stump was one of the giants that were sprinkled among the other tree skeletons. I realize there's no size reference here, but if you look at the big groove on the left side, between the buttresses ... I fit in there.

I know this, because I pulled the kayak up as close as I could and log hopped to that stump ...and then I climbed up the side and look into it's hollow interior.

Yes I did!

I have the GoPro video to prove it.

Later.

Maybe it's the teenage rebel in me, but when I look at this stump, I see the forest giving the finger to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Barge Canal project.

Next Rodman episode: "Big Charlie The Tree Crusher"

Kayaking The OTHER Wekiva River

Come on.
Grab your paddle and I'll show you some of the "other" Wekiva River.
Around here, we pronounce it "WE-KIVA" (LONG I, ACCENT THE WE)

The other Wekiva is down around that little town that the mouse ruined ... starts with an O, but it escapes me now.
THAT Wekiva is actually a state park.

This one is not, but it should be.

Push off from that bank and I'll show you what I mean.

Since we are going upstream from the mouth, we'll need to launch on the Waccasassa River first, then paddle up to the confluence.
When the Waccasassa curves to our left, we will go straight into the mouth of the Wekiva.
Here we go ...

The Waccasassa is a beauty in her own right, but like the Wekiva, she has some blemishes.
Curiously, each and every blemish is courtesy of us.
Imagine that.

Take this old shrimp boat for example ...

(PLEASE TAKE THIS OLD SHRIMP BOAT ... AWAY!)

This vessel is pictured in the second post here on Pure Florida, April 11, 2005. She was floating back then. Today she has floundered and is a derelict vessel crumbling and rusting away ... adding who knows what pollutants to the beautiful Waccasassa River system.

I could so RANT right now, but it is such a beautiful October day.

Paddle.

We are still on the Waccasassa and you can see how tidal she is, even here, miles from the Gulf of Florida.

This is a place where fiddler crabs scuttle over cypress knees as salty ocean slowly yields to spring fed freshness.

A juvenile Yellow-Crowned Night Heron totes a crab, that even de-legged, seems too big to swallow.

Could you look just a little more dino?
Sheesh.
That eye ... I think I saw it in the kitchen in Jurassic Park.
Clever girl.

We left the Waccasassa behind after that Night Heron.
Now, we are on the Wekiva. She's fed by Wekiva Springs, miles upstream from where you and I are paddling. The water is now clearer, the bottom cleaner due to a brisk current that issues from the spring.

It's still influenced by the tides ebb and flow, but right now, with the tide out, freshwater rules.
Let's push on upstream, when we poop out we can always turn around and cruise back with the current.

No telling what is up around the next bend ... and there are lots of bends.

Somebody ought to paint that scene.
It's classic Florida Cracker Cattlesqueish.

This Cracker bull was guarding his herd as they fed in the river swamp.
I was so focused on the cows up ahead wading into the river for a drink, that I didn't notice this guy ... just a few feet to my right ...until he made that low rumbling growl ... do cattle growl?
It sure sounded like a growl to me.

I was too busy gauging the depth of the river between my kayak and his horns to focus on his voice, but I think I know menace when I hear it.

How do you explain getting gored by a bull while kayaking?

2011?
1911?
1811?
1711?
1611?

It was a scene, so timeless and Pure Floridian that I just stared at the young bull as he glared at me, framed by cypress, palmetto, and palm.

Sometimes you just have to pause and drink it in.




There were more bends of course.
I'll tell you about them in another post.

Sturgeon Hunting and Water Under The Bridge

This morning, when I launched my kayak at Manatee Springs, I had a nice surprise.
One of my former students and his Mom were preparing to go kayaking too and they had a little black pup along.

Meet "Bridge", so named because he was part of a litter found under a bridge at Cedar Key.
He's pretty Labbydelicious, and when I remarked on that, they commented that he might have some chow in him too ... he's got a black tongue after all.
Whatever the recipe, he's pretty scrumptious.

The sturgeon were leaping again, but not quite as much as last weekend. The morning river was very calm and pretty clear for the ice tea colored Suwannee. Those plants in the photo above are about 10 feet below the surface.
It was neat to think that beneath me somewhere, hundreds of sturgeon were holding in the current, just waiting for whatever the stimulus is that sends them leaping sky high out of the comforting water.

I waited.
They leaped.
I missed shots.

There WERE other  things to see of course, gators, hawks, other fish in the clear water, people, etc.

They were nice distractions ... especially that bignificent gator on the far bank, but I was here for a singular purpose.
Sturgeon.

Eventually, one leaped into my viewfinder, but even this one confounded my Sony as it desperately tried to expose for the dark tree line while presented with the counter shaded white belly of a six foot Gulf Sturgeon.
I"ll take it.

I'm getting closer and eventually, I am going to get that sharp, close-up, correctly exposed sturgeon photo.

I'll save today's gators for another post.

Kayaking St. Joe Bay, Florida

Debbie of Happy Ours Kayak & Canoe Outpost sharing a chart of St. Joe Bay before Mrs. FC and I paddled out into the clear waters of the bay. I found Happy Ours just by doing a Google search our first evening in Port St. Joe.

I am so glad I did.



Debbie is a certified Master Naturalist with the state of Florida. On top of that, she's been doing this a while and really knows and loves the bay. She was so knowledgeable and fun to talk with, that we actually started paddling about a half hour after we were technically ready to start.



You can follow the link above for all the details, but here's the cost scoop on our little adventure.

• A tandem kayak rented for 4 hours = $45.


• A few incidental rental items like a pair of boat shoes and a waterproof watch = $4


• Total bill with taxes included, about $54.

I spend that much when I hit the movies these days and THAT fun is virtual ... except for the excellent movie popcorn of course.

Debbie's prices are very reasonable and the helpful service was excellent.

If it hadn't of been so, I would tell you, believe me.

Give her a try, you will not be disappointed.





St. Joe Bay is kept crystal clear by a rare combination of being almost totally enclosed by Cape San Blas and the absence of any major freshwater input via rivers. Add in the fact that it is very shallow and you get a unique experience of viewing the wonderful dwellers of the sea bottom.

Debbie recommended paddling straight out from Happy Ours towards Black's Island as that course would pass over shallow flats and deeper holes where fish congregate.


We took her advice and it was just as she said ... schools of mullet, killifish, and what looked like Spanish mackerel passed by continuously as we paddled.

Since you can see everything on the bottom as you paddle or drift, all the creatures from our wading fun of the day before made an appearance, plus some new ones.



The Keys? The Bahamas? No, ... North Florida!





Here is an egg case of the Lightning Whelk. I actually found one whelk in the act of laying the egg case.

Even though I have seen a bazillion whelk egg cases in my life, THAT was a first for me.

I think that illustrates one of the very special things about St. Joe Bay. The vast, quiet, shallow waters allow you to not just SEE a critter, but to see them in action. The silent approach of a kayak or a slow, quiet wade opens up a world where horseshoe crabs continue their grazing and courtship behaviors, whelks lay eggs, spider crabs compete for mates, and stingrays fly by, not in a frightened rush, but with purpose.

It was pretty much heaven.

Okay, it would have been heaven if the water had been just a little warmer. We were there at the tail end of winter and the water was just chilly enough (by Floridian standards) to keep my head above water.
Floridiots like me tend to be weenies about water temps that northerners would plunge in to with glee.

It has to be fantastic snorkeling after the water warms a wee bit.



Here's a lightning whelk creeping across the shallow bottom. This one actually crawled up on to my extended hand ... I have a video of that somewhere to show you.

Soon come.




This is a very cropped shot of a flock of Buffleheads who no doubt found plenty to eat in the teeming waters of St. Joe Bay.
What a beautiful duck!

Ignore my still winter white legs and focus on the dry bag. You can rent one from Debbie, but we had our own which we used constantly on this trip.
You definitely want one in a kayak if you are bringing anything you intend to keep dry.

I have used this Seattle Sports H2 Zero bag for a couple of years now and love it.

Nothing inside it has ever gotten wet and it's big enough to toss in beach towels, extra clothes, cameras, lunch, ... everything except a Labrador Retriever.

If you are taking along hundreds of dollars worth of camera gear, you definitely want them to survive the trip, so don't forget this vital piece of equipment.

If you do, you can always rent a dry bag from Debbie at Happy Ours of course.

When our 4 hours was up, we emerged from the bay with a wonderful, fun, unique experience under our belts. Debbie came out to check in our rentals and we walked out to the truck to the soothing sounds of her chickens clucking and her donkey braying for attention.

I'm sure she must pinch herself daily to be living and working in such a beautiful spot.

Below is a little video compilation I created showing a tiny bit of our 4 hours of bay bliss.

Enjoy it, but go experience the real thing if you can!!

Post Script: GoPro Camera Review

Regular readers of PF know I recently acquired a GoPro wearable video camera. This trip was the first time that I used the camera underwater.
I was curious to see how it would do, especially after reading online that it had focusing issues underwater due to the domed lens cover on the underwater case.

I found this to be pretty accurate, the focus is definitely softer underwater. There are some fixes for this out on the internet and all involve a flat surface over the lens.
The rumor is that GoPro is working on a fix, so I think I will wait to see what they offer before taking the plunge to fix this flaw.
Otherwise, I am totally having a blast with this neat little camera.

The Grass Is Everything

Yesterday, I dusted off the Pure Florida kayak and slipped out to the Shell Mound boat launch, just north of Cedar Key.


I had not kayaked for months, nor had I been to Shell Mound for a while.





Shell Mound is ... well, a mound of shells. It's a First Floridian midden, at first glance an "Indian Landfill", but it was likely much more than that.





In our flat coastal marsh topography, building mounds of shell offered both symbolic and strategic uses. Florida tribes warred with each other on a regular basis and building a hill out in the marsh offered lookout views not possible otherwise.





The large mound at "Shell Mound" sits next to a formerly mud boat launch site that has been improved just enough by one of my favorite guv'mint agencies, the USFWS.


It's all part of the Lower Suwannee NWR and the refuge folks did a great job of rocking it with gravel so it's less quagmirey, but not all fancy, dancy boat rampy.



Don't bring a deep draft boat to this launch and don't expect to get in or out at low tide, unless you can pick up your boat, drag your boat, or own an airboat.


The collage above shows the way in to the shell mound site, the gravelled ramp, and a few kayakish views soon after launching.



I launched with a high tide falling. I love falling with the tide and watching the seafloor emerge ... just never get tired of it.




The top of the avian food chain was well represented by a pair of ospreys lounging in a pine tree.


(Yes, the other one flew away before I could slow the kayak and shoot)



Some midlevel munchers were also in the area. There's no shortage of fiddler crabs here so the ibis are fat and happy.


(In a fit of honesty, I have returned to this post to delete my misidentification of these plovers. Thanks Myamuh and Tai for the gentle correctnifitinousity. Now back to our regularly scheduled post ...)

It amazes me how magically these shorebirds can disappear amongst the usual mix of sand and shell here. They are plenty obvious in this pic, but I walked right up on them on some oystery islands, before I realized they were there.



If you go solo, and your ego says it wants to be in at least one picture, be sure and pack your tripod or in this case, a monopod.


... or you could just leave your ego at home ... as if ...


To document that I was there, I leaned the camera/monopod against a big cedar, set the timer, and ran down the hill.

These pics are not of THE shell mound by the boat ramp. This is on an outer island. I followed the tide out, then paddled along the outside Gulf shore of the island until I came to an incredibly inviting landing site.


The islands out here are covered in a forest known as coastal maritime. It's a mix of the same species you might find back on the peninsula, but conditions out here on these tiny specks of land are so much tougher than inland.


For instance, this island is essentially one long skinny shell mound, another midden site built by the First Floridians.


What this means is ... there's really no "soil" to speak of. all of these plants are growing out of many feet of ancient oyster, clam, and conch shells.

Along with the whole, "no soil" challenge, the islands are small enough that they are inundated with saltwater by hurricanes and so porous that any rainwater quickly flows away through the shell.



Toss in prevailing winds that beat you with salt spray and you can see why it takes extreme woody determination to grow here.












Some don't make it.


They become monuments to those who do.


Here's the seaward view from atop the island of shell. You can see how building a shell platform out here could have great defensive possibilities.


When I left this island, I paddled out to the distant islands you can see in the above photo, but none of them were quite as appealing as this one.

I spent a lot of time here, poking around that bar you see in the foreground and wading a sandy flat to a tiny nearby islet.


Here's the Cedar tree that held my stuff for me. It's not dead, although what you see in this photo might make you think that ... same tree as the in the photo above this one. In this photo you can really see the shell matrix that all of these plants are growing out of.


No shortage of calcium in that "soil".




Litter left behind about 7 centuries ago ... maybe longer.
What a harmless bit of trash ... I left it there by the way.



In the mud around the island, there was an occasional beer can, a chip bag, and the stray bottle or two.


Remember when we used to get upset over litter? Litter that is often nothing,but an eyesore, although some, like plastics and fishing line can have real impacts on turtles and birds.

I'd trade a litter spill out there in the Gulf over an oil spill any day ... although OSHA would probably still require space suits and training before anyone could pick it up. Sheesh.


If the oil is swept this way, we will be horribly impacted ... more so than the sandy beach coasts that are being hit now.

Cleaning oil off sandy beaches is relatively uncomplicated (until the government gets involved).

Look at the picture above.

This part of Florida, the Big Bend region, has few sandy beaches. We have much more in common with the Mississippii River Delta, thousands of estuarine creeks and vast, I mean truly vast expanses of emergent spartina marsh grass.

On top of that, or maybe under that would be more correct, we have the largest, most pristine submerged seagrass beds in the country.

Barnacle babies crowd a spartina leaf.

Every single blade, above and below the surface is habitat, vital habitat for too many organisms to list.

The grass is food, shelter, fertilizer, nanny, solar collector, erosion fighter, water purifier ... the grass is everything.

We have everything to lose if the oil gets here.