The Watery Rave

By Joe Guthrie

The Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition is now off and running. The last few months are a blur of activity and frantic preparation, where we had no time to properly prepare ourselves.

We made it to the start by working insane hours, working the phone and email around through all hours of the night. The two and a half weeks between the holidays and the start of the Expedition Carlton and Elam and I all suffered from intense sleep deprivation as we hurried between meetings and our computers, buying gear, talking to our collaborators and organizing our equipment. We shopped for a trailer that could carry our kayaks, bikes, paddleboards, camera equipment. We researched specific properties, specific wildlife species and conservation issues we wanted to highlight.

The dry bags for stowing gear on our kayaks were out of stock. The wireless service provider for our portable wi-fi hotspots wanted a contract that we were not willing to pay. The rudder kits for our kayaks, which we naively thought we’d assemble ourselves, were far too involved and we needed them fixed by a pro. It seemed like one million adapter wires and batteries and connectors flooded the dining room table of Carlton’s house. Details, details, details…it was chaos.

We still had not rigged the kayak solar panels that we wanted to power our devices while we were out in the wilderness for seven days. We still had not loaded reliable satellite imagery into our GPS for our navigation, while important people would be arriving in hours to see us off.

Somehow we pulled it off. Carlton and I were both awake that last night until 5 a.m. Once the sun was us up there was no more chance to fool around with the phone or the computer. We had to load the boats and go.

Packing took until 2:30 in the afternoon–nearly two hours later than we’d intended, but we finally shoved off into the Bay. A flock of willet milled in the shallows just down the beach. The weather forecast was perfect. As I pulled through the first paddle stroke I felt relief begin to work through my system. Now we had to just go do the thing.

Day TWO: The First Full Day

Day Two of the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition began at the Joe River Chickee in Everglades National Park, Florida. At least three of us (Carlton, Elam and Joe) awoke from a sleep of over four hours for the first time in weeks. The morning light came up and we saw that we were in a bowl of water about 1/4 mile wide and fish jumping near the base of the red mangrove trees all the way around our bowl. The sky was clear and there was no wind. In all, a pretty nice winter day.

Without much discussion, the morning took on a relaxed pace. We were all a little fried from the mental stresses of the preparation for our Expedition. It felt good to have left those worries behind, if only temporarily. We made breakfast with flatbread and Nutella and cream cheese with bananas. Elam tended the coffee press.

Mallory and Elam paddled out first around 11, while Carlton and I packed more slowly. As we got under way I fished a jig up next to the mangroves and caught a 12″ spotted sea trout. A slight north wind picked up. Carlton fussed with my phone and its poor service. Several times he got far ahead of me during our paddle. I decided that I still needed to work on loading my kayak properly since everyone else was faster than me. It wasn’t until later that Carlton told me that he’d been frustrated with the wind and the poor service and that his speed was due to his “paddling emotionally.”

We caught up with Mallory and Elam at the second Joe River chickee, where we’d planned to eat lunch. They’d been waiting patiently for us for some time. The next leg would involve crossing a broad stretch of Oyster Bay, where we expected to get spray from the northwest across our boats. We were running behind after Carlton and I had spent too long on our first leg. I changed into rain gear, not wanting to arrive in the dark in wet clothes at a place where we could not build fires.

We made good time across the bay and arrived at the Oyster Bay chickee in short order. It was sheltered from the open bay by a narrow island of red mangrove trees. As Elam was unloading his kayak he lost balance and toppled into the water. He was unhurt, and he’d already off loaded all of his camera equipment, so we all had a laugh as we documented the first casualty, including Elam.

Day Five–Entering The Sawgrass

An update from the team: “We are in the sawgrass in the middle of our route through the Everglades. We are on schedule and food is holding up well. At night the insects drive us into our tents, and we end up sleeping for 8 or more hours, a nice departure from the weeks of no sleep we had leading up to the start of the expedition. Poor cell service makes blogging difficult, but the signal seems to be improving, so bear with us. The scenery is unreal. Poling a kayak through the sawgrass is a true Everglades experience.”

Flamingo, Florida to The Okefenokee Swamp, South Georgia

THE ADVENTURE:

There’s a reason the majority of humans residing in Florida inhabit the coastal segments. In the land of the endless summer where flatness prevails and the entire ecosystem creeps, crawls, squirms or slithers, the coastline and its windswept break from the eternal furnace and bouts of marsh foot offer access to several of the most sensational marine ecosystems on the planet. From surfing to fishing, waterskiing to diving, coastal Florida offers an endless litany of watery recreational opportunities, yet without the advent of air conditioning even these marvels of nature would be no more than a day trip to a theme park.

Some see the interior of the Florida peninsula as a burden, a marsh-laden stretch of mosquitos, alligators, snakes and just enough things that can work their way into your orifices to keep the mainstream and alternative societies at bay. Even when packing a survivalist attitude, the interior environment is not a place the average American calls home.

That’s only because we limit the term “Average American” to the human population. For panthers, bears, wading birds, alligators, crocodiles, kites and a host of primordial flora and fauna, the interior of the state is the last frontier, a final gambit of natural selection that hasn’t been paved, planted, hijacked or drained.

THE PLAYERS:

Carlton Ward Jr:

Carlton is a conservation photographer from Tampa, Florida. His passion for nature was born from the Florida landscape, where eight generations of family history have grounded his perspective. He sees natural environments and cultural legacies as the earth’s greatest yet most threatened resources.

Carlton is a founding fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP) and founded the Legacy Institute for Nature & Culture (LINC), a non‐profit organization with the purpose of celebrating and protecting Florida’s natural and cultural heritage through art. While completing a Master’s degree in Ecology, Carlton wrote Conservation Photography, the first thesis on the emerging field. Carlton’s immediate focus is the Florida Wildlife Corridor project which he established in 2009.

Joe Guthrie:

Joe migrated to Florida while working for the University of Kentucky to document the ecology and conservation of a small population of the Florida black bear in Highlands and  Glades counties. His interest in conservation stems from an outdoor upbringing in rural Kentucky, where he hunted and fished the hollows of his family farm.

Joe collaborated on multiple research projects, focusing on neo‐tropical songbirds, Kentucky elk, before taking on the role of team leader for Florida black bear research. Joe’s master’s thesis focused on the function of corridors and highways crossings for bear movement in the fragmented landscape of south‐central Florida. Researching the wide‐ranging black bear allowed Joe and his UK colleagues to connect with ranchers and stakeholders from many backgrounds, and through their cooperation the bear project continues today. This special population of bears, centered on private land in a part of Florida that is little known to the outside world, provided the inspiration for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition.

Elam S. Stoltzfus:

Elam is a Producer, Director and Cinematographer of film documentaries and educational programs featuring environmental issues, educational/corporate training programs and developing projects utilizing various formats of media such as DVD, web design, social media and other media.

He is known for his educational programming and design consulting. Elam is the manager and owner of Live Oak Production Group, Inc., a High Definition professional broadcast video production company, as well as a freelance film and video producer. For the past twenty‐five years Elam has documented diverse aspects of Florida’s natural resources which include estuaries, rivers, swamps and aquatic preserves.

Mallory Lykes Dimmitt:

Mallory is a multi‐generation Floridian who grew up exploring the lands and waters of Florida. She specializes in landscape scale conservation, natural resource management, ecosystem service markets and water and energy issues.

She is a Director, Vice‐chair of the Corporate Responsibility Committee and a 5th Generation Committee member of the Florida‐based family agri‐business company, Lykes Brothers Inc. She also serves on the board of LINC, the Legacy Institute for Nature & Culture, where she previously filled the role of Interim Executive Director, and got her start in social media.

Mallory earned her B.S. in Natural Resources from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She was awarded a Doris Duke Conservation Fellowship at Duke University’s Nicholas School of Environment, where she earned a Masters of Environmental Management (MEM) in Environmental Economics and Policy, as well as a certificate in Non‐profit Management.

THE STORY:

Bike, hike, paddle or push through the Florida Everglades up to the Okefenokee Swamp, a 1,000 mile trek  through some of the nastiest, gnarliest, scariest and most beautiful, pristine terrain in southern North America. The 100-day trip through gator land and turkey sand will have the group goose-stepping around bear scat and panther tracks as they document a segment of Florida rarely seen by the average Miggy minion.

Traverse the Everglades ecosystem into Big Cypress Swamp, over to the Everglades Agricultural Area, back to the Okaloacoochee Slough, across the Caloosahatchee River, over to Babcock Ranch, back along Fisheating Creek toward Lake Okeechobee, up the Kissimmee River with excursions toward the Lake Wales Ridge, up the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, east around Orlando into Ocala National Forest, and north along the O2O corridor (Ocala to Osceola) to Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge stopping along the way to smell the sugar cane and orange peels burning, view the cowpies smoldering in psilocybin and throw rocks at the metal culverts directing water off the land.

The project kicked off January 17, with little Florida Everglades fanfare. Just a handful of egrets and a school of mullet in attendance, but nonetheless the first stop on an adventurous journey across the peninsula.