Port Tack to Adventure: A Close Encounter of the Manatee Kind

Thursday was another lazy day in the Rivera compound in Florida. We decided to do some kayaking in the channels around the house do some fishing and maybe harvest a couple of coconuts from the five or six coconut trees around the house.

I now have a better appreciation for the challenges of Robinson Crusoe in getting coconuts to have fresh drinking water. These palm trees are 30 to 40 feet high! Throwing stones at them don’t help, there are no branches long enough to knock them down and the trunk of the tree is too rough to climb up and get them. One of the big problems is that this well endowed gut keeps the body out too far for the arms to reach around and hold on to the trunk of the tree. Not that we would have strength and the stamina to climb that tree with this office working, wine drinking, donuts-eating and skin-so-soft treated hands. And even if we did go to Home Depot and buy a tall enough latter to get up there, there are monsters protecting their coconuts up there. I can just picture reaching for that coconut and losing your fingers to those prehistoric creatures lurking in the branches above.

Kayaking and fishing seemed much more pleasant. The house came with three of them and we (Alex, Adan and Adrian) decided to paddle out in the channel, look at the fish, check out the pelicans up close and maybe come across some Manatees. We got to see them all.

A Pelican comes in for a landing (and hoping for a free handout of fish)

A Manatee Encounter of the First Kind

The Washington DC half of our group had to leave to go back home today. It was sad to see them go, but I’m sure not as sad as they were about going.

We decided to go to the beach and check out the underwater life and had another close encounter of the jellyfish kind and hundreds sea shells and little colorful fish. The sediment from the broken dead coral stirred up easy and we could only float on the surface to keep things visible.