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A floating buffet for gators!
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Some folks hope I’m kidding about the paddle boarders being a floating buffet for alligators.
Well, it’s time to explain alligators in Florida.
The fuckers are ubiquitous (and besides that, they’re everywhere) and despite wildlife aficionados’ claims that the gators are basically harmless and need to be left alone evidence suggests otherwise: when I first moved to Florida I watched a documentary about gator attacks in a certain Florida city. The residents, being the saps that they were, stated that they were going to live in harmony with nature including the many alligators living in close proximity to them. (Having spent my life outdoors I’ve learned that much of nature considers you a tasty meal—or an annoyance at best.)
The residents, determined to stay fit and active, and being determined to live in harmony with nature by experiencing the outdoors as much as possible, favored a certain path to walk through the semi-wild around their homes. The gators, not being either the stupid or docile creatures that most people assume they are, quickly figured out that there was easy pickin’s in them thar hills and started lying in wait for the walkers, who they would then grab and drag into the nearby water and kill them and eat them if the walkers didn’t manage to escape with just a severe mauling. After the third death occurred when a gator came out of the water and crawled more than 30 feet to grab a woman who was gardening and drug her back into the water and killed her the residents decided that living in harmony with nature wasn’t such a damn good idea after all and demanded that officials do something. They killed the problem gators and relocated many others only to discover that you can put a gator thirty miles away and it will navigate its way back to where it was if it desires.
After watching the documentary my desire to get up close and personal with gators in the wild left me entirely, especially when I learned that a small gator can outsprint you if you’re close to it—a gator as small as four feet in length can kill you easily if it can get you into the water—and even the behemoths are capable of moving incredibly fast for short distances (Up to 30 mph...can YOU run 30 mph?).
When we were moving into our Florida home one of the old timers here told me that every now and then you’d see an empty boat floating down the river; someone had either fallen overboard, or had decided to cool off with a swim, and had become gator food. I thought it was the Florida equivalent of a Texas Tall Tale until I happened to see just such an incident reported on the news.
The home we were renting had an eight foot gator in the canal in back of us...at night you’d hear him roaring and making some of the (best I recall) twenty-some-odd different sounds that gators make. Our local hospital has retention ponds with alligators in them. One of our local large chain hotels has a retention pond with gators swimming in it. This is in a town close to 95,000 in population! I learned that if there’s a puddle of water in Florida it probably has a gator in it.
And what most people don’t realize is that gators can tolerate salt water for brief periods of time, and they do venture into saltwater...they have been seen in the ocean as far as two miles out from shore. I have researched official documentation of this fact.
So are these people in the Intercoastal Waterway in danger of a possible gator attack? Yes.
Do I go into the water at all in Florida? No. How about the Ocean? Well, the U.S., and New Smyrna Beach, Florida in particular, leads the world in shark attacks...so...no, I don’t go into the ocean either.
Ironically enough we produce more world-class surfers here than anywhere else, and lots of people kayak, paddle board, canoe, etc. But me...I know there’s something out there somewhere that wants to make a meal out of me, and I’d rather push my chances on the bike than in the water.
Happy paddling, buffet members.
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Some beach-goers put their stand-up paddleboards near me, which was very teasing! I wasn't able to bring mine and I was missing it a lot!
Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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20230724-15-14-03--LH date - 7/24/23 time - 15:14:03
Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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20230724-15-20-10--LH date - 7/24/23 time - 15:20:10
Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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20230724-15-20-12--LH date - 7/24/23 time - 15:20:12
Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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20230724-15-15-54--LH date - 7/24/23 time - 15:15:54
Scouts paddleboarding during the 2023 National Scout Jamboree at The Summit Bechtel Reserve in Mount Hope, West Virginia. (BSA Photo by Leo He)
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20230724-15-12-53--LH date - 7/24/23 time - 15:12:53
A photographer can be seen in the water taking pictures of the men as they set off on their paddleboards.
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