Salt Water Kayaking and the Iguana Whisperer

Saturday, 12/3, was spent relaxing around the RV. It was a nice change of pace. The weather was still warm, but very windy. We want to do some kayaking, but there is a small craft advisory and craft doesn’t get much smaller than ours! Lol.

Just hanging out in Paradise.

On Sunday, we decided to take the kayak and try for a paddle to Indian Key. The put in point was about an hour away and by the time we got close, the wind had kicked up again and there were 2 ft. waves and whitecaps. Not gonna happen today. Lol.  So we turned around and ducked into Bahia Honda state park to check it out and walk the beach. They have a lovely campground with fantastic waterfront sites, but it was booked solid 9 months out when I was making our reservations.

Cloudy skies above Bahia Honda State Park.

High tide on the beach.

Can’t complain about our KOA site, though. We were amazed that the park is only about a third full, but one of the staff said that their busy season doesn’t usually start until after the holidays. Lucky for us! I also warned you that I would be sharing more pictures of the campground’s resident iguanas.  Turns out Rog is the Iguana Whisperer. Lol. Maybe it’s more a case of “feed them, and they will come”.

Hey girlfriend, you got a little green stuck there on your mug. :)

Happy to see Rog. 

Salad for lunch.

The Iguana Whisperer. Lol. 

We also took a side trip to Bat Tower Road just a few miles away on Sugarloaf Key. In the 1920’s, real estate developer Richter Perky, believed that the hordes of mosquitoes were the only thing standing in the way of success for his fishing resort. This was before any control measures were put in place and the voracious clouds of blood-suckers were unbelievable. One twentieth-century entomologist caught 365,696 mosquitoes in just ONE trap in ONE night. (And we were complaining about the little biting no-see-ums. Ha!)

A Texas doctor had success building artificial roosts for bats to combat mosquitoes there. Perky bought the plans for the “Malaria-Eradicating Guano Producing Bat Roost” and spent $10,000 building the 30’ tall bat tower, with “all the conveniences any little bat heart could possible desire.”  (Really, I am not making this up!)  Unfortunately, not a single bat moved in. He tried importing some bats, but they flew off. The tower has withstood 80 years of weather and hurricanes and finally has a resident, an osprey built a nest on top.

The Bat Tower, the only flying resident is the Osprey in the nest on top. 

 “All the conveniences any little bat heart could possible desire.”  Lol. But it's in the wrong neighborhood!

Since our Sunday kayaking plans were a bust, on Monday we chose a launch site closer to camp and a little more sheltered. We put in at Sammy Landing and our plan was to paddle up Sammy Creek into Lower Sugarloaf Sound.  There are dozens of little keys and mangrove hummocks and, while it looked easy to navigate on google maps, they all look pretty much the same from water level. Lol. After a few false starts we finally made it out to the Sound. It was still windy, so we had the best luck in the protected areas around the mangroves seeing fish and lots of little snowflake jelly fish. Randi had sent me a photo of the snowfall in Kent just as we were starting out on our kayaking trip, so we got a big kick out of the snowflake jellies.

We tried a different launch point a few miles away on Summerland Key on Tuesday. But we didn’t take into account the low tide and the water just wasn’t deep enough even for the shallow draft of our kayak. We managed about an hour or so out on the water and it was a fun paddle, but we kept dragging bottom (hey, no jokes about losing that 10 pounds!) and the wind was baaaack, making it hard paddling.

Sammy Creek looking out toward Sugarloaf Sound. 

The only snowflakes we saw in Florida!

Snowy egret in flight.

Sea grass is plentiful in the shallow waters.

Lots of tiny fishies above the sea grass. 

Rog has been hitting the fresh seafood market nearly every day this week – fried grouper, yellowtail snapper fish tacos, shrimp, calamari salad, smoked fish dip…. we are suffering. Lol.  Since Tuesday was our last night in the lower keys, we had dinner out at a local restaurant, the Square Grouper, very tasty seafood stew for me and a grouper sandwich for Rog. Of course, we had to finish up with the requisite key lime pie, but they also had peanut butter pie, a favorite of ours, on the menu. What to do? Dilemma solved! Order one of each and go halfsies. Lol.

We leave Wednesday, 12/7, and have a couple of travel days to get to our next destination, Cedar Key, on the Gulf Coast of Florida.