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After three almost endless flights through Dakar and Washington to Atlanta, I arrived in the United States for the first time. Gordon picked me up from the airport and we drove back to his place in Decatur, east of downtown Atlanta. Iwas dead on my feet after over 24 hours of travel so we spent the afternoon quietly packing for our kayaking trip to Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge on the southern Georgia border with Florida.
I was still tired but feeling much better when we got up at 5am on Monday morning. Jane, a friend of Gordon's and a medical doctor working for the CDC, picked us up around 06:30 and we started the 5 hour drive south through Macon and Cordele, turning off at Tifton towards Pearson and the Homerville. Driving through rural Georgia was interesting - fancy homesteads next to trailer parks, almost everyone driving huge American pick-ups and brandishing hunting rifles. We arrived at Stephen C Forster State Park sometime before noon and checked in at the reception office. While Jane sorted out the admin, I walked around and tested my new camera on Double-crested cormorants, Black-and-white warbler and alligators. Just before 1pm we sat down at a picnic table for lunch of bagels and cream cheese, generously supplied by Jane. We were waiting for a friend of Janes's, Sharon, driving through from Charleston, to join us. Sharon showed up while we were having lunch so when we finished, we drove back to the reception office from where we rented one canoe and two kayaks to do a bit of paddling for the afternoon. Gordon and I first shared the canoe as it was slightly easier getting our balance and paddling technique going and we thoroughly enjoyed this unique experience. There were some birds along the way, mainly American white ibis, Snowy egret, Little blue and Green herons as well as Pileated woodpecker and Belted kingfishers. I discovered that birding, especially birding photography, and canoeing/kayaking don't mix at all. Although the canoe/kayak is super-quiet and you can get quite close to the birds, it takes a fair time to stop and stabilize it sufficiently to look through binoculars or a camera lens. Also, since you're on the water, the binocs and camera are packed away in a dry bag between your legs, so every time you want to use it, you have to stop the canoe/kayak, get the camera/binocs out, steer again because you've started drifting, then keep steady enough to try and find the bird again - it's almost impossible!
We got to Billy's island around 3pm and walked around what used to be a small settlement. A white-tailed deer watched us tamely as we walked past but the trees for eerily quiet. By 15:30 we were back at the small pier where we tied our transport and we now switched around so that Jane and Sharon shared the canoe while Gordon and I tried our hands in the single kayaks. We both quickly discovered that although the kayaks are a little less stable in the water, they at least have decent seats with backrests (unlike the bench-like seats in the canoe) and responded faster to paddling. We were back at the office shortly before 5pm and after pulling our kayaks/canoe up on the shore, made our way back to the campsite. After pitching tents and setting our beds up, we settled down to a great dinner of couscous and lamb curry prepared by Jane and watched a Barred owl make its way across the darkening campground.
After a good night's sleep we woke to a completely fogged in morning. We had a 90-minute drive to the other side of Okefenokee and had to be there before 10am so we packed up quickly between a bite to eat and then drove along the southern edges of Okefenokee, briefly crossing into Florida. We eventually turned west again just before Folkston to Suwannee Canal Recreational Area. This time we were going to sleep out in the swamps so we took a almost an hour to repack all our gear into a number of drybags and stuffed them into our kayaks and canoe. Gordon and I decided to stick to kayaks as they were more comfortable to sit in while Jane and Sharon again shared a canoe. We finally got underway shortly after 10am and enjoyed a good 2-hour paddle before heading into what they call prairie, a bit of swamp with far fewer cypress trees and more open grass and lily floating rafts. We came to what's literally an anchored raft made with plastic modular sections tied together, where we stopped off for lunch. This raft had a neat picnic table under a shady roof as well as a chemical toilet to the one side. It was an awesome place to have lunch, floating in the swamp!Paddling through the prairie was a little more difficult as the canals are much shallower so you tend to scoop up quite a bit vegetation with each stroke - by the time we got back to the main canal to start heading for our campsite, we were starting to feel the strain on our backs, shoulders and arms. But it was still an amazing experience so we didn't mind at all. Having paddled another 3 miles or so after our lunch spot, we arrived at our campsite at about 4pm. It was a wooden deck with a large roof and picnic table, partially anchored on a solid island, and partially standing in the canal. A long drop toilet stood about 75m away. We were now out of the prairies and surrounded by large cypress trees, but there was a patch of more open plains on the swampy island a few hundred meters away and we heard Sandhill cranes land and take off from here as dusk slowly settled. We pitched our tents under the roof and made our beds. I was borrowing bedding stuff from Gordon and thinking that it won't be cold enough to justify a 4-season sleeping bag, I had opted for taking a few blankets along. This time dinner consisted of self-help burritos with some great options of fillings, again thanks to Jane, and we stuffed ourselves before chatting into the night. By 9pm it started getting significantly colder with a bit of a breeze picking up, and we all headed for bed.
The breeze was obviously a sign of things to come as a cold front started pushing through during the night. The wind picked up even more and by the time we got up and was very cold (around 3 or 4 degrees C) and the wind strong enough to seek shelter from. The dense cypress trees helped protect us from the worst of it but we still wanted to get going quite quickly so it wasn't long after a cup of coffee and breakfast that we headed back out onto the water, this time covered in a number of layers to keep warm. As we got into slightly more open sections of the canal and our muscles warmed up, we shed a layer or two but even by mid-morning the wind was still strong and cold from the east. We took a slightly different route back, going through a denser short-cut that was a bit more interesting. It was amazing how close you could get to basking alligators - literally no more than a meter away from the kayak before they would disappear into the water! About a mile before the end, we took a short detour into another prairie that was covered in water lilies. It was quite pretty and we spotted some Great and Little blue herons. But in this open are with little cover, the wind was really hitting us hard and we didn't stay very long before heading back to the more sheltered canal and then back to the start. We were back just before lunch and after unloading the kayaks and canoe and re-packing the car, we had a bagel-lunch at a picnic table outside the reception office. We then walked through the Visitor centre and watched a short movie on Okefenokee. We drove around a bit as well, visiting an example of an old homestead, showcasing how people used to live in the area in the 1900s. Unfortunately it was closed and we could only wander around the outside. A kilometre-long boardwalk took us to a 10m-high observation tower from where we could look out onto large sections of the swamp. Having been in the thick of it for 3 days, it was a very different perspective and we also spotted a few American coots in one of the ponds. Although it was still quite cold, we could imagine how hot and uncomfortable it must be during summer as even in the cold there were still a fair number of mosquitoes around!
After three almost endless flights through Dakar and Washington to Atlanta, I arrived in the United States for the first time. Gordon picked me up from the airport and we drove back to his place in Decatur, east of downtown Atlanta. Iwas dead on my feet after over 24 hours of travel so we spent the afternoon quietly packing for our kayaking trip to Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge on the southern Georgia border with Florida.
I was still tired but feeling much better when we got up at 5am on Monday morning. Jane, a friend of Gordon's and a medical doctor working for the CDC, picked us up around 06:30 and we started the 5 hour drive south through Macon and Cordele, turning off at Tifton towards Pearson and the Homerville. Driving through rural Georgia was interesting - fancy homesteads next to trailer parks, almost everyone driving huge American pick-ups and brandishing hunting rifles. We arrived at Stephen C Forster State Park sometime before noon and checked in at the reception office. While Jane sorted out the admin, I walked around and tested my new camera on Double-crested cormorants, Black-and-white warbler and alligators. Just before 1pm we sat down at a picnic table for lunch of bagels and cream cheese, generously supplied by Jane. We were waiting for a friend of Janes's, Sharon, driving through from Charleston, to join us. Sharon showed up while we were having lunch so when we finished, we drove back to the reception office from where we rented one canoe and two kayaks to do a bit of paddling for the afternoon. Gordon and I first shared the canoe as it was slightly easier getting our balance and paddling technique going and we thoroughly enjoyed this unique experience. There were some birds along the way, mainly American white ibis, Snowy egret, Little blue and Green herons as well as Pileated woodpecker and Belted kingfishers. I discovered that birding, especially birding photography, and canoeing/kayaking don't mix at all. Although the canoe/kayak is super-quiet and you can get quite close to the birds, it takes a fair time to stop and stabilize it sufficiently to look through binoculars or a camera lens. Also, since you're on the water, the binocs and camera are packed away in a dry bag between your legs, so every time you want to use it, you have to stop the canoe/kayak, get the camera/binocs out, steer again because you've started drifting, then keep steady enough to try and find the bird again - it's almost impossible!
We got to Billy's island around 3pm and walked around what used to be a small settlement. A white-tailed deer watched us tamely as we walked past but the trees for eerily quiet. By 15:30 we were back at the small pier where we tied our transport and we now switched around so that Jane and Sharon shared the canoe while Gordon and I tried our hands in the single kayaks. We both quickly discovered that although the kayaks are a little less stable in the water, they at least have decent seats with backrests (unlike the bench-like seats in the canoe) and responded faster to paddling. We were back at the office shortly before 5pm and after pulling our kayaks/canoe up on the shore, made our way back to the campsite. After pitching tents and setting our beds up, we settled down to a great dinner of couscous and lamb curry prepared by Jane and watched a Barred owl make its way across the darkening campground.
After a good night's sleep we woke to a completely fogged in morning. We had a 90-minute drive to the other side of Okefenokee and had to be there before 10am so we packed up quickly between a bite to eat and then drove along the southern edges of Okefenokee, briefly crossing into Florida. We eventually turned west again just before Folkston to Suwannee Canal Recreational Area. This time we were going to sleep out in the swamps so we took a almost an hour to repack all our gear into a number of drybags and stuffed them into our kayaks and canoe. Gordon and I decided to stick to kayaks as they were more comfortable to sit in while Jane and Sharon again shared a canoe. We finally got underway shortly after 10am and enjoyed a good 2-hour paddle before heading into what they call prairie, a bit of swamp with far fewer cypress trees and more open grass and lily floating rafts. We came to what's literally an anchored raft made with plastic modular sections tied together, where we stopped off for lunch. This raft had a neat picnic table under a shady roof as well as a chemical toilet to the one side. It was an awesome place to have lunch, floating in the swamp!Paddling through the prairie was a little more difficult as the canals are much shallower so you tend to scoop up quite a bit vegetation with each stroke - by the time we got back to the main canal to start heading for our campsite, we were starting to feel the strain on our backs, shoulders and arms. But it was still an amazing experience so we didn't mind at all. Having paddled another 3 miles or so after our lunch spot, we arrived at our campsite at about 4pm. It was a wooden deck with a large roof and picnic table, partially anchored on a solid island, and partially standing in the canal. A long drop toilet stood about 75m away. We were now out of the prairies and surrounded by large cypress trees, but there was a patch of more open plains on the swampy island a few hundred meters away and we heard Sandhill cranes land and take off from here as dusk slowly settled. We pitched our tents under the roof and made our beds. I was borrowing bedding stuff from Gordon and thinking that it won't be cold enough to justify a 4-season sleeping bag, I had opted for taking a few blankets along. This time dinner consisted of self-help burritos with some great options of fillings, again thanks to Jane, and we stuffed ourselves before chatting into the night. By 9pm it started getting significantly colder with a bit of a breeze picking up, and we all headed for bed.
The breeze was obviously a sign of things to come as a cold front started pushing through during the night. The wind picked up even more and by the time we got up and was very cold (around 3 or 4 degrees C) and the wind strong enough to seek shelter from. The dense cypress trees helped protect us from the worst of it but we still wanted to get going quite quickly so it wasn't long after a cup of coffee and breakfast that we headed back out onto the water, this time covered in a number of layers to keep warm. As we got into slightly more open sections of the canal and our muscles warmed up, we shed a layer or two but even by mid-morning the wind was still strong and cold from the east. We took a slightly different route back, going through a denser short-cut that was a bit more interesting. It was amazing how close you could get to basking alligators - literally no more than a meter away from the kayak before they would disappear into the water! About a mile before the end, we took a short detour into another prairie that was covered in water lilies. It was quite pretty and we spotted some Great and Little blue herons. But in this open are with little cover, the wind was really hitting us hard and we didn't stay very long before heading back to the more sheltered canal and then back to the start. We were back just before lunch and after unloading the kayaks and canoe and re-packing the car, we had a bagel-lunch at a picnic table outside the reception office. We then walked through the Visitor centre and watched a short movie on Okefenokee. We drove around a bit as well, visiting an example of an old homestead, showcasing how people used to live in the area in the 1900s. Unfortunately it was closed and we could only wander around the outside. A kilometre-long boardwalk took us to a 10m-high observation tower from where we could look out onto large sections of the swamp. Having been in the thick of it for 3 days, it was a very different perspective and we also spotted a few American coots in one of the ponds. Although it was still quite cold, we could imagine how hot and uncomfortable it must be during summer as even in the cold there were still a fair number of mosquitoes around!
