Hunter Springs Park, Crystal Spring and Three Sisters Springs

Yet another paddle to beautiful springs in Northern Florida!

This time we put our kayaks in at Hunter Springs Park.  This was not going to be a wild paddle -- unless extravagant waterfront homes, big boats and marinas are wild.  Well, I guess they are, in a sense.

We did, however, see much more wildlife than we expected when we first hit the water.  Something we've never seen before is an anhinga scratching itself in a tree.  He turned himself inside out and backward trying to get that itch:

Then there were the birds hanging out on the buoys marking off the swimming area at Hunter Springs Park -- the gull --

-- and the cormorant:

Despite the intense development of this estuarine area, shorebirds found many places of their own.  This lesser blue heron had a little fishing spot all to herself near the seawall of the park:

And there were ducks everywhere!  These were just the ones that let us get close enough to photograph them well:

Boatyards and marinas dotted each shore of the outer bay, known as Kings Bay:

But even the boatyards had their wildlife.  This great white heron was holding court in the side yard of one marine facility --

-- while these cormorants established a quorum on one of the empty docks near some upscale homes:

Eventually, we passed Crystal Spring, which is closed to all boat traffic to protect manatee nurseries.  We turned up the channel toward Three Sisters Spring, and here we found the crowd of tourists massing to try to catch a glimpse of manatees.  There were tour boats, private motorboats, kayakers, waterboarders and snorkelers, all jockeying and elbowing to get the best view or photo when a manatee or two would venture out among these amateur paparazzi:

The closer we got to the manatee protected area, the worse it got.

We got very lucky, however.  As we waited on the edge of the throng, a mama manatee and her baby swam right under Dave's kayak.  In the photo below, mama is under the kayak, showing the baby how to do it, and the baby is screwing up the courage to follow.  In short order, the baby swam under the kayak, and then could not be persuaded out for a while.  David dared not paddle while the two manatees were under there.  Another kayak rammed into him, causing his kayak to hit a snorkeler, who wreaked revenge by shoving Dave's kayak away from the manatees.  Let us just say the humans were not as pleasant as the manatees.

We extracted ourselves from the mass of ugly humans and paddled into quieter sections of the Three Sisters Springs channel.  After exploring that, we worked our way back out the channel, past the madding crowd, to where we spotted this anhinga drying its wings in peaceful solitude, not even caring that we paddled right up next to her as she tended to her toilette:

We paddled to the end of the channel, on the inner edge of Kings Bay, and found an empty beach where we could beach the kayaks and eat our lunch.  Coincidentally, we were right across from Floatin' Gringos, a cute little pontoon cafe and taqueria moored in the middle of the channel.  We watched as boaters occasionally puttered up to it and placed their snack or lunch orders.

While we were watching the food drama, another manatee swam lazily by and we were able to watch it poke its snout above water briefly as it swam lazily out into the bay:

It was time to push off the beach and continue our journey.

We decided to paddle over to nearby Buzzard Island, the only natural piece of ground we passed in our entire paddle today.  At the northern point of the island, Kathy spotted a rock formation with a whole horde of turtles sunning themselves.  Again, for some reason they let us get close enough for a detailed group portrait:

Kathy spotted this osprey at work searching for dinner in the darkening sky over the bay:

We decided the dark clouds were a possible portent of stormy weather, so we decided to paddle with dispatch back to Hunter Springs Park.  However, we did make it a point to pass a couple sites we had seen on the way out, to take a closer look.

One was an island with a single house on it.  At one end of the island, just off the front yard of the house, this pelican preened himself on "his" roost:

At the other end of the island, two flocks -- one of cormorants, one of anhinga, shared a bare tree, where they had built nests.  We could see the little heads of the chicks popping out of the nests, calling for their meals:

The other site we went out of our way to pass was a second island, uninhabited by humans, but which was the nesting ground for a group of pelicans.  They didn't seem to mind our stopping by to catch up on the news:

Thus satisfied that we had explored the three springs and Kings Bay as much as we could given the impending weather, we paddled back to Hunter Springs Park and joined the (many) other paddlers beaching kayaks and loading them onto vehicles to head home for supper.

On to another spring in a day or so!