October 8 to October 14, 2016—South St. Lucie Lock, Stuart, Florida
We finished out our stay at the ACE lock facility here, after the hurricane hegira. A nice camp—small (nine sites), friendly and helpful staff, top notch infrastructure, interesting to watch the lock operations with pleasure yachts of all description flowing back to the Atlantic from their west coast hurricane refuges, and friendly neighbors.
Wildlife
Manatees enter the locks with boats. Several of them in front of our canalside residence one day, for hours . Big, fat, docile creatures, hippo-like. They loll around underwater slurping up food, not showing much ambition. Brenda says the manatee is my spirit animal. You see their nostrils sticking up out of the water, or their broad backsides, or sometimes their rounded tailfin.
(the swirl of water is a manitee, you’ll have to trust me, and the boat is George’s.)
Exotic birds of every description are all about–ibises, spoonbills, egrets, herons of all varieties. They come streaming out of the mangrove forest in the early morning.
A dead alligator washed up. An eight-foot long, white, belly-up carcass, stinking to the heavens. The stench drove some boaters away from their boats until Park ranger Art came to tow it out into a cul de sac of the mangrove forest across the canal.
A number of small and large parks with trails within a few minutes drive. Atlantic Ridge Nature Preserve was a vast network that we sampled a few miles of. Their claim to fame is the periodic prescribed burning they do to mimic what would have happened in the area through the pre-human millennia. I think they might be overdoing it a bit. We did see some bobcat tracks but the preserve seemed rather devoid of life. We actually got locked in this park—the exit gate was padlocked when we tried to leave and had to make some phone calls to find someone to let us out. Still not sure why that happened. (Now that I think about it I am not sure they want people in this preserve. Besides being locked out, there were no signs, and the only available map was an indecipherable tangle of lines worse than the map of the Hudson River island I complained of in a previous post. Now that I think on it more, I like the idea of a piece of land kept in its most natural state that would even go so far as to discourage humans from visiting it. If someone wants to bring a compass and supplies and climb a gate, they could come in.)
Bikes
We bought a couple of single gear bikes off Craigslist, $30 each. We used them a lot exploring the area in two directions along the canal and surrounding farms. We’ll keep them at least until New Orleans next month, altho Brenda’s is a cute paisley-decorated orange Huffy that she is growing fond of. Huffy is a Chinese word meaning “sloppy welds,” I believe.
One place we biked to was on a shell trail east along the canal that ended after a few miles under the Florida turnpike. We found ourselves standing under massive concrete arches supporting a highway maybe seventy feet above. It started to rain and we were protected under the highway. Water running off from the highway bridge high above started pouring out of spouts located about every ten feet along each side of the bridge. It was an engineering and architectural marvel, water pouring down in even intervals amidst these soaring concrete columns, some falling onto the ground, most falling into the canal or the surrounding swampy area. It was an operatic setting, a Seven Wonders of the World setting. One of my favorite places of the trip.
Neighbors
There are four boat slips for rent at the lock. George was at one in the catamaran he has called home for eleven years. He entered the canal the day before the hurricane was due to hit here, planning on getting further west, but a fuel pump went out before he got to the lock. He poled the boat into a mangrove swamp, put out four anchors, took the dinghy into a marina and sought shelter on land. He had slim hopes of seeing his boat again, unless it was to find it tossed up into the mengrove forest, but the storm took a favorable turn and his boat was intact. Took him five hours, he said, to get the anchors untangled from the mangrove roots and up and he broke a toe in the process.
Extremely nice guy, George. In his mid sixties, squeaking by on social security, leading a peripatetic life. He and his then-wife had built a trimaran in San Francisco when he worked there in the early 1970s. He sailed it east through the Panama Canal after the marriage. Just a few months ago he found the boat still afloat and being used by a family on the west coast of Florida. He was in Stuart picking up his traveling companion, Happy, for a repeat of their years-ago trip to the Bahamas. Brenda and Happy had a nice walk together and Brenda looked forward to spending time with her but she had to decamp to attend to some family matters. Happy was a real 1960s San Francisco free spirit, raising two kids in a van for many years until one of the kids said, “Mom, when people ask where we’re from what do we say?” When I told George we were planning on going to Baja Mexico he made me a gift of a nice hardbound book of the Baja peninsula, with detailed coastal maps and histories of all the little towns along the way. A generous gift to an appreciative recipient.
We had drinks several evenings with Janice and Steve. They had a portable icemaker, the device which I most covet. A cold drink is a treat for us. They live on a twenty two foot motorboat and a 40 foot motor home. They don’t own a home on land, haven’t for six years. Somehow they have coordinated the movements of these two vessels to cover the country several times, mooring one or storing the other for extended periods, or taking them both somewhere. They coming project is “the Great Loop” by boat—up the intracoastal from Florida, up the Hudson, across the Erie Canal, across the Great Lakes to the Mississippi (via the Ohio?), around the Gulf back to the beginning. Their boat is a sharp-looking affair, fiberglass made to look like lapped wood, lots of teak.
(the rare two-headed Florida Sandhill Crane.)