51) Silver Springs

Well, you can ignore the previous post, the canoe cart only made it a quarter of a mile before breaking. However it worked pretty well up until that point.
This is what it was supposed to look like.

The T-joint under the canoe was just too fragile and snapped with the weight of the boat bouncing on it. I will rebuild with a sturdier joint and try again - as always I'll report my findings here. Given that, I must say I am glad that one of my childhood heroes was MacGyver - I would have never made it to the canoe launch without the spirit of Richard Dean Anderson's character guiding me. I even considered canceling the outing, but with gas running around $3.30 per gallon, I would not drive back to Gainesville in shame. This is what I came up with, I simply duct taped the padding to the axle and jury rigged this to the canoe.


Once out on the water, there was a slight mist coming off of the river and I was immediately greeted by a river otter and a family of Rhesus monkeys hanging out at the waters edge, the river gods were smiling on me:) I made it up to the springs just as the theme park was opening (the land around the springs is a privately owned nature theme park, however the river and the springs are protected public property... as long as you stay in your boat you can hang out at the spring for as long as you like! = no admission) I saw tons of amazing wildlife including birds, gators, huge gar, alligator gar, and more, here are a few pics.


This shadowy gar was probably around 4 feet long, these torpedos can weigh up to 50 lbs!


Silver springs is the largest artesian spring formation in the world, and it is definitely worth fighting the current to get to the headwaters. I even got to see the sunken remains of an old native american dugout canoe, while I floated above in my modern day version...too cool. Here are some shots of some of the springs, the white around the opening is sand and shell fragments that are blown up from the depths by the strong flow.


This was a great day paddling, the canoe is a bit squirrelly heading upstream solo, a keel would help, but I want to do some more exploring before I decide to sacrifice the super shallow draft. On my way back to the launch, I paddled over a group of drift divers exploring the river from below, looks like fun.