Flotilla 2010 was a great one!

[annd]

Actually, it was more than great. It was utterly jim-dandy!

It was a little bit upside-down and backwards, though. Traditionally, on the first Sunday of the flotilla we hold a howdy-glad-ta-meetcha pancake breakfast in the campground. With a bumper crop of 34 attendees this year, it would have been a great year to actually a have first-Sunday get-to-know-ya day. But, alas, Sunday dawned rainy. Really rainy. Gobs of water pouring down out of the sky rainy. So we postponed to Monday. Guess how Monday dawned. Right you are. So we postponed. One of the next days, we actually did have our pancake breakfast. Could have been Tuesday. Could have been Wednesday. The dawnings blur. But when it happened, it was dee-licious. And, what do you know, everybody had already gotten to know each other just fine, even without a liberal application of Sunday morning maple syrup.

Since this was such a rainy year, we had maybe the finest Nine-Mile-Pond paddle ever, with plenty of water to keep our paddle blades up above the healthy but grabby shredded-wheat layer of periphyton that covers the bottom of the marsh.

Some of us took a drizzly afternoon paddle out to Garfield Bight on a conveniently rising tide to watch the wading birds on the mud flats. Hundreds of egrets and herons and white pelicans! We saw reddish egrets, including one white morph, doing their wing-flapping fish-herding dances. There were roseate spoonbills, and a bald eagle, and Sallee and Vance, in the right place at the right time in their G2, were visited by a manatee who came almost close enough to touch.

Firsts this year were a tour of the Nike missile site, the first-ever successful navigation of the entire Mud Lake Loop by Flamingo flotillians, AND a swamp tromp led by our very own Ranger Tim. Many thanks to Spidey (Dennis) for dismantling one of his hammocks to provide swamp-tromping poles. See, you have to have a pole to test the next spot where you plan to set your foot so that it (your foot) doesn't fall into a sinkhole in the limestone. You can also use your pole to make noise so that the cottonmouths know you're there. (The only snake we saw was a harmless king snake, though.) Tim led us across the watery sawgrass marsh and into a cypress dome, and if you've never been inside one, get yourself a hammock pole and head for the 'Glades! Or come on down next year, with shoes that can be subjected to muck. Tim promises he'll take us out on another tromp.

Attached are some photos taken by Tim and me. You can tell whose are whose by the artistry. If there is any, they're Tim's!