Days 95-6 in Sanford

Day 95 went pretty much as advertised as a day of rest. The restored downtown runs parallel to the south shore of the lake about 2 blocks inland from the marina. We walked downtown to visit some art and antique stores and had lunch in a German restaurant. Somehow the hofbrau house atmosphere was tainted for me with tattoos on some of the waitresses. It just did not seem to fit my image... Anyway, the food was excellent. The marina sits just off the shore on a small man made island along with a motel and nice waterfront restaurant. This make the choice of a dinner location very easy, and I had an excellent Caesar salad topped with grilled fish.

Day 96 began with about a 3 hour dingy trip up the St. Johns River from the southeast corner of Lake Monroe. Lake Monroe is a large lake at 15 square miles, with an average depth of only 8 feet. At this point we are 141 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, and evidently mild tidal effects still reach this far. However, there is virtually no salt with 0.2%  as compared with 3.5% for normal sea water. The flow rate is only about 0.5 mph on average, but locally can be higher. The first picture shows the chart for our dingy trip starting at Lake Monroe in the very upper left corner. Like the lake, the river is now only 8 feet deep and is now less than 300 feet wide. The river now also has a lot more marsh and a number of small anastomosing stream channels. This myriad of channels often made navigation confusing (before GPS anyway).

 At this point we were still 80+ miles from the actual headwaters of the river, but it becomes increasingly swampy and finally totally un-navigable. The length of the river is well over 200 miles, but the gradient or drop in topography is only 30 feet over this distance. No wonder it flows so slowly! This is as far up river that we are going on this trip anyway... 

Although the dingy trip was short, there was lots of scenery, including these grazing cattle and horses. The steamboats (and railroad) opened up this interior part of Florida to agriculture as well as tourism. The St. Johns River is known as a "black water" river. To me it looks more like dark red, but the color is due to tannic acid from the rotting organic material in all of the swamps as well as fertilizer from the fields (and lawns).

This is my personal favorite picture of the day -a tree full of vultures...

Meanwhile, back at the dock we were treated to lots of (mainly) mallard ducks. It seems that they enjoyed eating algae that grows on the floating docks. These must be very savvy ducks since there are plenty of alligators in and around the marina. I did not get any pictures, but we did see at least 5 more manatees today.

Just down the dock from Lucky Us is this reproduction paddle wheeler that does dinner cruises, wedding, etc. It was busy today, and the party goers were treated to wonderful weather and glassy calm water. All in all, Sanford has been a very nice stop. We are well rested and ready to start down river in the morning. Obviously we will be following the same route, but we hope to take a couple of side trips. For one, we hope to visit one of the many springs with crystal clear water that help feed the river.