We are barely out of the marina, heading into the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge for a day of research in the mangroves, when Joyce Mazourek, the refuge manager, gets a “rescue-me” call from one of her staff. Her outboard has died. Can we give her a tow? We motor over to the boat, listen while the motor is fruitlessly cranked, agree sagely that it is definitely not starting and tow it back to the boat ramp.

We set out a second time, idling through the manatee protection zone (boat propellers are one of the chief causes of manatee injury and death), then Joyce pushes the throttle down for a high-speed slalom ride through the mangrove-fringed islands that make up the refuge. Ten Thousand Islands, adjoining Everglades National Park, has some of the best preserved mangrove habitat in the US.

Ten thousand islands? Well, no. More like a few hundred, but who’s counting? I first came across this island maze off Florida’s south-west coast while scouting for mangrove sites on Google Earth. From the air, the islands looked like cells under a microscope.

Then I found out that Andy From, a GIS (geographic information systems) guy with the Fish and Wildlife Service, would be spending two days in the refuge downloading data from his water level monitoring sites. He invited me along.

This first day is devoted to checking the island sites; tomorrow we will go into the marshes by airboat. Andy occasionally consults a satellite map, but mostly navigates by memory—this is his 17th trip to collect data. His monitoring equipment consists of a PVC pipe sunk into the mud, with mesh-covered holes near the surface so that water can flow into them, and an ultrasound distance recorder in the top of the pipe.

While Andy downloads the sea level data to a handheld device, Joyce sucks up groundwater from three different depths to measure temperature, salinity and electrical conductivity. All this data provides baseline information for a coming restoration project. Decades ago, canals were dug in the watershed north of the refuge as part of a massive real-estate development that never got off the ground. Those canals deprived the marshes of fresh water, disrupting the natural hydrology and changing the flora and fauna. The plan is to restore sheet flow of fresh water across the refuge, and Andy’s data will allow environment managers to measure the effects.

I busy myself with the mangroves themselves. It’s high tide, and tree-climbing crabs have clustered around the trunks of the trees, some of them several metres up. I try to photograph them, but as soon as I get within range they sidle to the opposite side of the trunk. When I move around that side they scuttle back to their starting point. I keep up this game of hide and seek for a while, then give up. They are too nimble for me.

As the day proceeds we have some lucky critter sightings. We startle a spotted ray, jet black polka-dotted with white, and watch it wing away through the murky water. Crossing a shallow area, we see horseshoe crabs, those ancient armoured arthropods which have changed very little in 400 million years. The air temperature is in the 90s Fahrenheit, and I’m eyeing the water for a dip, but change my mind when a two-metre bull shark swirls around the boat. The area is known for them. They are an unpredictable species, and the turbid water pretty much rules out swimming with them. I don’t want to end up a case of mistaken prey identity. Bulls don’t have the megadentition of great whites, but no way would you want to have their pearly whites sunk into your leg.

We stop for lunch. Andy has made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for him and me, and is alarmed to see Joyce eating a fruit salad with banana. Like many fishermen, he considers bananas to be bad juju on boats. “Oh, oh,” he says. “We’re in trouble now.” Joyce says she’s been eating bananas on trips into the refuge ever since she started as manager a few months earlier, and has never had boat trouble. “But maybe it’s a case of CBS—Cumulative Banana Syndrome,” I suggest. “All that pent-up banana karma is about to be unleashed.”

I spoke truer than I knew. As we started for the last site of the day the motor started making a gnashing noise, and eventually cut out completely. Something had seized in its innards. We ended up paddling the last mile to the marina, past the mansions of the Port of the Islands resort, watching for manatees and listening to the chattering call of a bald eagle.

It was a pleasant way to end the day, but we agreed that, tomorrow, no bananas!

Tags: Florida, Ten Thousand Islands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 11:27 am and is filed under Trip update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.