quote:

Originally posted by SpinZone:
I stress to all of our out of town guests that if there is water, there is most likely a gator.

Growing up in Fla, mom always said, “unless it’s a glass of water, there’s a gator in it.”

And she was right. I was scuba diving in the Withlacoochee River at the CG station in Yankeetown (it’s a dark water river) and seeing a 10’ gator lying half floating with only his tail on the bottom was disconcerting to say the least. We gave up looking for fossilized mastodon teeth at that point. I went and bought a 357 power head that afternoon.

Yep, stay away from ponds, lakes with small animals, gators just see food. Neighbor who no longer lives here, let their golden play on the edge of the large pond behind the subdivision, one day a 12 ft gator lunged out, grabbed it and took it down to the bottom.

We see more gators now than ever since the city is allowing construction in areas that have been untouched since the beginning of time.

The Little Econ where this happened is fed by the St Johns water system, and in that is Lake Jessup and Lake Harney, and some of the most gator infested waters in the state, it's where Disney dumped the gators they found when building Disney World out of the swamp.

With all the increase in population here, growth is going out that way, and the big gators are moving even more so through the waterways.

quote:

Originally posted by SpinZone:
I stress to all of our out of town guests that if there is water, there is most likely a gator.

I have a buddy in the Ft Myers area who tells me this. He had a Northerner visiting who called “bull”.

They walked to a nearby pond, stood looking for a few minutes, and a gator helpfully made an appearance. Made a believer out of that guy!

I had a buddy come down for a visit sand we drove down to Key West for a few days. On the way back, he remarked that he was surprised he hadn’t seen any alligators, to which I responded, there’s one. And another, and another…