Yeah, that Suwannee River. You know, the song: Way down upon the Suwannee River, far, far away...
I'm at the Suwannee River State Park in Live Oak and launched from the boat ramp there this morning onto the Suwannee River. I'm a lot farther north than I expected. The temperature was in the mid/upper 60's and I had a polartec sweater on in the face of a 10 knot wind blowing out of the north and the east.
The Suwannee River is 230+ miles long, beginning at Lake Okeefenokee in Georgia and running all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. This stretch of the river is about 75 feet wide and dark with tannic acid so I couldn't judge how deep. Plenty of water in any case, even though the river's down about 10 feet. Oaks and cypress trees are growing out of the river banks many feet above the water line with the cypress knees scattered all over the place.
The river is nestled between high banks (for the most part) on both sides. This is something I haven't seen much of in Florida where everything else is so flat. Much of the banks are pitted limestone that look like big chunks of Swiss cheese with lots of holes.
Talking to a pair of canoeists yesterday, I was told sturgeon are jumping in the river. Yeah, those are the guys that make caviar. They're a prehistoric fish dating back millions of years. They can grow to 9 feet in length and up to 300 pounds in these waters. Like everything else, man had hunted them almost to extinction so my guess is there aren't many much more than 6 feet and 200 pounds.
I turned north, into the wind as usual, to get the hard stuff out of the way early. With the wind blowing so strongly, I didn't notice I was also paddling against the current. I did know I wasn't going very fast though. I was hoping to get up to the SR 249 bridge I had checked out last night. The GPS said it was 5.6+ miles as the crow flies. With the twists and turns of the river I figured about 8 miles up and another 8 back.
Right at the boat ramp is a large flood gauge sitting on top of a 10 foot hill. It stands about 10-12 feet tall and the high flood level is at the top. Now that must have been a lot of water. Sure glad I wasn't around to see it.
With the water level so far below normal, much of the limestone usually under the water is now well above. This provides a unique view of the erosion being caused by the river as it cuts into the rock. This creates overhangs and the water also digs out small caves and grottos and other interesting formations. One section looked like a miniature village of cliff dwellings such as those used by the western Indians in years gone by.
Many really large oak and cypress trees lined the banks. Most of the shore was smaller oaks though. Some kind of floating plant with large 4 leaf clover type leaves were clustered around branches sticking up out of the water. They must get torn loose upstream, drift down and become entangled in the branches and continue to grow there. I swept the paddle as far as possible under a fairly large bunch and encountered no resistance (and therefore no roots?).
Some sections of the river appeared as though a giant stone mason had laid out large blocks of limestone in building a wall. Other sections seemed as though the same mason had used a huge wheelbarrow to dump loads of scrap rock into a jumbled heap at the river's edge.
I passed a lone canoeist with a load of camping gear on his way downstream as I struggled up. We stopped and chatted for a while (as I constantly drifted backwards, downstream) He is really an enthusiast for the Suwannee River. My impression is he's paddled its entire length several times and is always doing shorter sections.
I checked the GPS about noon and saw after 2.5 hours of paddling I was only half way to the bridge. That took the wind out of my sails, but not out of my face as the wind continued to gust up to 15 knots. I stopped for lunch to see how I'd feel afterward. I started back upstream and was immediately hit with another 15 knot gust. I just stopped paddling and let the wind and current take be downstream.
Out of curiosity I got the GPS out again. When the wind was not blowing, I was drifting along at up to 1.5 knots, at least according to the GPS. With the wind blowing, it fluctuated between 2.0 all the way up to 3.0 knots. No wonder I was developing a crappy attitude.
I encountered very little wildlife and this seems to be the experience of others, on this stretch of the Suwannee River, anyway. A fair number of turtles, a couple of ducks, a kingfisher, some kind of gray heron about the size of a great egret and a couple of vultures and that was it.
I was paddling along and heard a big splash. My first thought was alligator. I turned around and saw the rings left from the splash a third of the way out in the river, so it couldn't be an alligator. From the sound of the splash I'd say it was a 3 foot or so sturgeon. A little later I heard a smaller splash but that was the extent of the wildlife on this day. (03/24: Later in the day a ranger caught a 7 foot, probably 200 pound, sturgeon on chicken liver while fishing for catfish. Sturgeon are also bottom feeders).