Hot weather finally comes to Florida

After two weeks of cool weather everything changed. The highs for the next two weeks are forecast to be in the low 80’s.

We left our Tampa Bay campground on Monday morning and headed to a Pioneer Park, a county park campground, on the Florida Cracker Trail. We came here because it is on the Peace River, a popular canoe trail, that flows south from near Winter Haven down the center of the state to Port Charlotte. During the dry season it has all sorts of shallow limestone shoals and sand bars. However the heavy rains about a week ago brought the river way up so we had 1000 CFS at our campground in Zolfo Springs.

With the high water we wanted to do at least an 8 or 9 mile trip and there is only one outfitter and only runs shorter sections, and wanted $30 to do a special shuttle to take us up to Paynes Creek. This would be a 11 mile paddle.

Each nite hundreds of vultures would nest for the night in the big trees. This is about 1/5 ^th of the group we saw.

We were really disappointed with this campground which was just a big field with all the campers right on top of each other but they had 50 amp electric & water hookups. They have a nice primitive campground right along the river with lots of shade but Peggy likes to have power.

One good thing was that the RV right behind us was from Ohio and they offered to shuttle our canoe and us upstream to Paynes Creek State Park on Tuesday morning, using the rack on their Subaru Outback.

It was a easy shuttle up the state highway to a highway put-in next to the park.

He took this picture when we launched.

The current was fast and even with a stop for lunch at a wayside park near Wauchula, it only took us 3 hours. We saw at least 12 alligators basking along the banks on this sunny day. At this level there were no shallow spots, just a few trees here and there to avoid.

Peggy at our lunch stop. There was nobody else on the river. The section from Paynes Creek to this wayside park in Wauchula was very remote and pretty, after this point there were many homes along the way to the take-out in our campground.

We brought our lightweight canoe cart with us so we could pull our canoe back  to our campsite you can see in the distance.

Adjacent to the campground is a nice museum and a series of old FL buildings.

Known as the Florida Cracker Museum, it has stories and artifacts about the original settlers called crackers. They say the name was from the crack of their buggy whips. Each year during the last few weeks in February a big festival is held here.

We got to one of our favorite, but hard to get in without reservations, campgrounds which is on an island next to the Franklin Lock in the big cross Florida river called the Caloosahatchee.

We  got site 7 which has a beautiful view of the river and big tree that often has Bald Eagles looking for fish.

On Friday morning we took the nice paddle one mile downstream and then up Telegraph Creek for two miles which is a tiny creek that passes through a small neighborhood and then into a wilderness setting. There are lots of trees across the river but it can be navigated with no portages. Hover it was much more work then our 11 mile float down the Peace River.

The weather finally turned warm, red temps are above normal. No rain.

SUN 2/03 Actual Temp 81° /60° Sunny Hist. Avg. 72°/53° Ruskin

MON 2/04 Actual Temp 70° /61° Sunny Hist. Avg. 75°/48° Zolfo

TUE 2/05 Actual Temp 77° /54° Sunny Hist. Avg. 75°/48° Canoe 11 mi

WED 2/06 Actual Temp 82° /52° Sunny Hist. Avg. 75°/48°

THU 2/07 Actual Temp 83° /60° Sunny Hist. Avg. 76°/55° Ft Myers

FRI 2/08 Actual Temp 81° /63° Partly Cld. Hist. Avg. 76°/55° Canoe 7 mi

SAT 2/09 Actual Temp 81° /63° Partly Cld. Hist. Avg. 77°/55°