The Everglades

"I urge every discontented man to take a trip through the Everglades. If it does not kill him, it will surely cure him" - unnamed, 1800s Everglades explorer

I spent three days exploring the southern portion of the Everglades. One day by car, and two in a canoe. It is not the place TV led me to believe over the years. For one, is is mostly marsh, not swamp. For another, a huge section of the park is a shallow bay, riddled with mangrove islands (hammocks) and serpentine channels.

The Everglades is not a terribly picturesque place, because vast swaths are relatively homogeneous. By my looking at it, sawgrass and mangrove constitute 99% of the biomass in the park. And for animals, if you like insects, fish, and birds - this is a great place for you. But still, I wound up with a lot of pictures, and the canoe trip was pretty neat.

I paddled 7 miles through mangrove swamp and interior bays to Hell's Bay chickee. The beginning part was very tight, involving a lot of caroming off the sides of the channel and ducking overhanging branches. It's a real maze in there, with over 160 markers in just 4 miles. That actually went pretty quick though, and I made it to the chickee pretty early in the day. So of course, I got back in the canoe and set off-trail to the west, looking for a passage to whitewater bay. My only map made it look possible, but there were no markers now, just a tiny 1" square section of the park service brochure, my GPS and compass. I did not make it to Whitewater Bay before I had to turn around to make it back to camp before dark, but I felt pretty confident I had found the trail. This assurance cost me 2.5 hours of paddling and added 5 more miles to the trip log...

The night was uneventful. Beautiful and a bit windy, but very calm and quiet. The moon was super-bright, I did not need a flashlight. And after it went down, it was so clear that even starlight was enough to make out the important features. Sometimes, when the wind would gust strongly, I could feel the chickee shudder, but this was the most unnerrving thing to happen. No alligators climbing on the deck, no canoe drifting away.

Come morning, I felt re-energized and confident, so I decided to take the alternate route back that I found, even though it invloved a decent hike to the car at the staritng point. I did find Whitewater Bay, less than 0.5 mile from where I turned around the day before. Then the trip got more dificult. The route back involved finding two small passages from larger bays to smaller ones. My map and GPS check me roughly on track, but the mangrove forest all looks the same and distances aross the bay are really hard to judge. So seeing the passages from far away is almost impossible. For example, the passage from Coop Bay to Coop Pond I did not see until I was 20 yards away. It is maybe 10 yards in width, and Coop Bay is 2 miles in diameter!

Furthermore, it was windy, which made the open water parts a bit choppy, which also makes paddling harder. Fortunately, I did not have to paddle upwind much. I learned this trip that when by yourself in a canoe, you are travelling in a big wind vane, and it can be really diffiuclt to turn into the wind, or paddle a course that is not downwind. But everything worked out well, with no more than 1 miles of wrong turns and search patterns. Of couse, there was an alligator sitting right where I intended to beach the canoe, but I found a close-by alternate landing. A quick lunch, then I hiked the 6 miles back to the car and returned to the hostel.

I thought it was a good adventure, and a decent accomplishment, since I haven't paddled a canoe in 15 years, only for an hour, and only the one time in my life. Next time though, I think I definitely should bring the fishing pole...