Water things

This morning Randy called me out to the boat dock to see something. It was a large fish that was swimming so close to the surface that its back was out of the water. We watched it a moment, trying to figure out if it was eating, or sick, or what. Suddenly from across the canal came an alligator, swimming straight for the fish. 

He swam within 3 feet of it and paused, and the fish moved away. Suddenly the alligator turned, caught up to it, and went for it! I've never seen an alligator catch prey before so I decided to watch it instead of trying to take a picture. This guy launched himself completely out of the water, like a killer whale, and dived head first on the fish with open jaws. Then he paused, motionless. I expected to see the fish hanging out of his mouth until I realized he'd swallowed it whole. He stayed still, watching us to see if we would move. We were close enough to see instead of laying horizontally in the water, his body was hanging down vertically from his big dinosaur head.

After 2 or 3 minutes he decided not to worry about us and moved on further up the canal. Randy, who was outside longer than I, said he caught another fish later. I love it here!

Later in the morning we took Carlo and Ana out for a boat ride. Shorty quickly decided he liked Ana, who gave him lots of attention. 

The amount of rain we've gotten has turned canal water coffee-colored, but it's not mud. The rainwater picks up tannins from the forest floor before getting to the canal, and when there's a lot of rain, it can get a lot of tannins.

We boated into Lake Griffin Park, then turned around and went into Lake Griffin, where we dropped anchor by an island and relaxed. We had a lovely visit but after awhile the darkening clouds prompted us to head back. 

Ahead I saw a white line on the lake; this is where rain was pouring down. There was no choice except to go through it. 

We had the canopy up but it didn't matter. It was raining really hard and the simple act of moving forward got us all soaked to the skin. All in the game of boating!