Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Since this was our last full day here, we decided to take a canoe thru some of the Everglades area in Collier-Seminole Park. We had a leisurely breakfast and paid for the canoe at the Entrance station, where we selected paddles and life jackets. We drove over to the marina, selected an aluminum canoe, and pushed off into the wild blue yonder, to mix a metaphor. That’s when Monika told me she didn’t know how to paddle a canoe!

As you might expect from this beginning, things were occasionally quite exciting on our trip out to Mud Lake, mostly consisting of running into mangrove roots. Fortunately, the roots give way rather well and thus cushion the crash in a forgiving way, so no harm was done. We saw a few waterfowl up close, but most of it was gone by the time we got there—we were remarkably noisy. We also had to dodge the dingbat pontoon tour boat that goes out every hour and a half both on the way down and on the way back. The channel is quite narrow so we had to crash into the mangroves yet again whenever the pontoon boat came charging by.

We made it to Mud Lake in about and hour and 15 minutes, and found that the lake was, in fact, mostly mud. At high tide, I surmise, the lake would have maybe a foot of water and be navigable by canoes, but at low tide not even canoes can get thru without portaging, and the mud is very sticky so I wouldn’t want to do that. We figured we were only good for another hour or two, so we headed back as planned. The tidal current mostly helped us on the way back and we getting more coordinated, so the trip back was only a little over an hour. We hadn’t found anyplace to stop and stretch, however, so after over two hours of paddling we were both tired and stiff and glad to get out of the canoe at last. They say in aviation that “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing!”, and the analogous saying for a canoe might be “Any canoe trip you don’t flip over is a good canoe trip!” Using that standard, this was a good canoe trip.

We headed back to the camp for lunch, stretched our muscles with a walk to the camp store, and finally took a nap before dinner. Along the way we saw the “walking dredge” that helped build the road for the Tamiami (Tampa-Miami) trail, which was a large, awkward-looking contraption that could, however, move itself over the swamp while dredging.