January 8, 2013 Dallus creek, Florida

Finally a sunny day. Little wind. We took off with the boats to Dallus Creek, which we discovered yesterday when we were out exploring.

We put in where the picture of the boat put in is.  It is all in the salt marsh, with twisty turns the whole way.  We put in at high tide, the whole creek is tidal influenced. Paddled up steam and back, about 2 miles, then went down stream to about the a in Dallus  and back. Probably about 2 more miles. Took about 3 hours. It got up into the mid 70’s and was wonderful. We saw a red breasted merganser, a grosbeak, cardinal and a king fisher. We must have scared off the alligators, we didn’t see any, but they are there. In the fall and spring there are lots of migrating birds. This area is on the Florida birding trail.

It is so shallow that the boats have to be flat bottomed, many people just use air boats like the one above.  We only saw boats at the put in, the rest of the time we were by ourselves. The front of my kayak headed up stream. Not much current.

John speeding ahead. We kind of explored all of the forks-they are not shown on the map. I would go up to the very end, sometimes so narrow that I had to back out. There were areas palm trees and areas of pine trees further inland.

Palm trees. There were some crab traps. John pulled one up and it had 4 blue crabs in it.

We had lunch on this bench. It was nice to get out of the boat. On the way back through tidal swamp we saw an armadillo along the road.

When we got  back I took my lawn chair to the dock and worked on the basket.  It is 12-14 inches in diameter and about 6 inches tall. I just need to finish off the top edge and add some beads and things, then shellac it. We had our mail sent here, John was picking it up and chatting with our host, Miss Lynn- who is the the sweetest lady.  She had a restaurant and hotel here and in 1993 a unnamed hurricane blew through here in March- long after hurricane season with a 12 foot surge and it took out most of the buildings in Keaton Beach. She rebuilt her home and put in the RV park.  It is mostly full on weekends with people from Georgia. They leave their rigs and boats here and come back every weekend.  There are 5 spots for people passing through like us. It is wonderfully quiet during the week.

Views of the basket, all the shells are different, so all the sides look different. It is still in progress.

Sunset on the dock. Finally clear enough to have a nice gulf sunset.