Waccasassa River Camp: Day 49, Florida CT Paddle 4.02.18

Dear Reader, Despite our love affair with Cedar Key and our staying up late (for us) to watch Return of the Jedi on tv, we got up at 6 a.m. and got going. It’s been so rare to have calm, beautiful, paddling days from first thing in the morning that we couldn’t pass it up. We were even half tempted to do the 17.5 nm open-water crossing towards the blinking lights of the distant power plant, saving ourselves a day’s paddle. But chose to be conservative because of our age. No need to take unnecessary risks. Paddling the shoreline is …

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Cedar Key: Day 48, Florida CT Paddle 4.01.18

Dear Reader, I’m in heaven! Which is very appropriate for Easter, and fortunately it’s No April Fools joke. The day opened with fog and then progressed from a sky colored white to one colored blue, with various permutations along the way. It was a perfect day of paddling through a navigationally-challenging but fun maze of exposed oyster bars and mangrove islands filled with bird life: Oystercatchers, egrets, great blue herons, pelicans, cormorants and osprey, as well as flocks of sandpipers and shorebirds which we couldn’t approach close enough to identify. The tide was low, exposing both crab traps and scattered …

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