FL Road Trip - Port Orange, FL

This is a series of places we visited along a road trip to Florida to handle some family issues.  As always, the road just invites me to explore "something else", and that is what we did during our one week trip.

Port Orange, Florida is where my Friends have a "weekend" home along the Halifax River and the Intracoastal Waterway, just south of Daytona Beach.  We were invited for a visit, a wonderful lunch and a kayak trip while visiting family in Central Florida.  Not far from Ponce de Leon Inlet, the Lighthouse is always on the horizon, the black mangroves sway in the breezes, and all kinds of waterfowl and shellfish are active.  I'm in the green kayak.

A type of whelk.

This is 2 shots of a shell fish that has a long body buried deep in the sand.

We paddled up a couple streams, first looking for an abandoned sailboat, eventually coming to a sandbar which was full of life.  Small fish jumped in the shallows.  Birds of all types swooped down to see what was going on.  There were 3 shells on this 20 foot spit of land, exposed by the tide.  Two were of the long shell fish type, buried deep into the sand.  They just sit and eat anything that swims or crawls over them.  The other was a whelk, and it seemed stuck and drying out.  We lifted it to the edge of the water to keep it wet, hoping it was the right thing to do.

Birds were everywhere!

I have always liked kayaks, canoes, sailboats, row boats and motor boats.  I grew up with my own boat as a child, playing away the summer hours of the late 1960's and 1970's in small Florida lakes and inshore along the coast as I got older.  The breeze that day, the clear sky, the smell of the brackish intracoastal water are all fond memories and the friendship just made them better!

2 guys paddling to nowhere and back.