Lake Okeechobee

Tuesday, June 7 - Today Tyler went to work/school with Bridgette, and Joe and I took a road trip in the Explorer, across Central Florida to Lake Okeechobee.  I'm happy to report that the Explorer is running fine now, after we spent $2248 at the Ford dealer (it had multiple issues) when we got to Tampa.  Central Florida is a landscape of flat marshy ground, lots of jungle-type growth in some areas, then fields of watermelons, sugar cane, etc., and then pastures full of cattle.  Lots of cattle raised in Florida.  We found a little restaurant out in the middle of nowhere for a great "blue plate special" type lunch, and finally arrived at Lake Okeechobee, probably around 2:00.  We went over the first access road we saw, and could see the lake in the distance, but mostly this was just a little bay with a boat ramp, with a lot of marsh between it and the big lake. 

 You really can't see the big lake in the background, beyond the green, and we never really found an access point that took us right to the lake.  We did see a flock of flamingos by one of these pools, and a couple of sandhill cranes.

 There was a second boat ramp here, but it was out of the water (there was just a little scummy pond at the base), and also a pier that we walked out on.  There were two State air boats parked here, but we never saw them launched.

We saw 3 alligators in the water here on the far side, and lots of little fish jumping.  We saw one heron eating a fish, but the camera battery was exhausted by then, so we didn't get that picture. We never heard or saw how low this lake is, but we certainly saw evidence of that all along it.  We drove down the west side of the lake but never really found another access point.   There were lots of canals feeding into or out of the lake, we never figured out which, because the levee was always there.  The northern part of this area was nothing but mobile home court/RV park, one after another, but finally we got into open fields, with cattle grazing right up to the levee.  We pulled off onto one of these canal roads, and found lots of gators here. 

Joe thought I was getting a little close to these, so he took pictures of me taking pictures, in case he had to prove where I was last seen.

There was a stairway/dock sitting at the back of this canal in the grass, further proof that the water here is very low.
There were 2 guys out on this canal, in a small boat, throwing out a net to catch bait fish (Bridgette called it a catch net, I think).  And a gator headed right toward them when they threw the net in the water the first time.  The gator went under, so we didn't see how close he got to the boat -- we figured he thought they threw something in the water that he could eat.

We watched these guys for a little while (we were on one of those little roads that probably was for authorized personnel only), then headed on down the road.  By now, we are looking in every puddle of water.  And, we were rewarded.  I saw a gator laying up on the bank, sunning himself.  Joe turned the car around and we went back to watch this big guy.

He laid there for a little while, then turned around and crawled back in the water.  We saw two other gators here in this canal (you can barely see the head, right off the tip of this point).  They are harder to see in the water than I expected.

Finally, we decided we need to make some miles, so we headed for home.  I would guess our little road trip was about 250 miles; we got home about 6:30.  It was nice to come home to a meal on the table -- Bridgette and Tyler made nice chicken salads for dinner.  It was a good day, and I hope I don't dream about gators tonight!