the wild way to go in Florida
Airboats are a hoot, but if you own one you’re probably a little nuts. They can go where no other boat can go, in very shallow water, so miles of otherwise unreachable wilderness are available for duck, hog and deer hunting and fishing around swamps, marshes and the edges of lakes. If something goes wrong out there it can be you and the gators and skeeters for a long time before help comes. Florida has lots of such habitat and thousands of crazy people who enjoy airboating.
Like motorcyclists, every airboater has disaster stories. One morning west of Vero Beach near Highway 60, I rode out of a marsh in a friend’s airboat with three of my pals, heading back to our cars after a successful morning duck hunting. We had our guns, decoys, the ducks we’d shot, food and other gear aboard. We were not going fast, maybe twenty miles an hour in a few inches of water—perfect for an airboat—when the driver changed directions at the edge of a deep canal choked with hyacinths. The boat instantly settled into the deeper water as we turned and its side caught on the small wall of stiff, brown hyacinths. In a millisecond the boat flipped over on top of us. Miraculously, we all swam clear and noone was hurt. Had the water been shallow we would have been crushed or pinned beneath the boat. We were able to swim to the nearby bank and walk a few miles to our cars. Later we dove for our shotguns, and the airboat was pulled out by a bulldozer and repaired.
I owned two airboats in the 1970s and spent a lot of time in the swamps of Florida, often at night, from the Fellesmere Marsh to the Everglades west of Miami. My favorite boat was a 14 ft. aluminum boat with a 240 horsepower Lycoming aircraft engine hung in a big metal screened frame in the stern. The screen saves arms and legs and lives, should you or your dog or kids fall rearward towards the big three-bladed propeller. Top speed was around 50 miles per hour, not particularly fast as airboats go, but it was an all-around boat that took me fly fishing, frogging, bird watching, duck shooting and beer drinking anywhere there was skinny water. Mine had a polymer bottom and would run on solid ground and over tall sawgrass, and because it was big and wide it made a good open water lake boat if you were careful. Airboats have very little freeboard aft, where the weight of the engine is, and more than one airboat has sunk like a stone when the driver stopped too quickly in deep water and the following wake washed aboard.
Most airboats have rounded chines-- the outside edges of the boat’s bottom-- which gives an experienced operator the option of a very cool trick--putting the boat through 360 degree turns at high speed. Perfect conditions for my best spins were plenty of Scotch Whiskey, shallow water and a dark night.
If your boat hits a stump at speed it could flip end-over-end and stuff you in the mud with the boat on top. Or, like a human cannonball, you’ll be shot directly ahead into the swamp while the parts of the boat remain behind. Better to be ahead than caught in the propeller-bustin’ wreck of the boat itself. There are no seatbelts in airboats. You hope for a soft mud or deep water landing if you hit something. Only experience shows you the big rocks, stumps and old fence posts to avoid. There are no brakes in airboats, so if you see an obstacle you increase speed and try to steer around it. I takes some guts to run an airboat in the wilds of Florida.
The only light at night in an airboat is the operator’s headlight. No lights for the guests. Mine was made from an aircraft landing light custom-mounted on a hardhat. The boat had three seats mounted on the engine frame facing forward. Two were built side-by-side for guests. My driver’s seat was higher, directly behind their seats. I operated the rudder with my left hand and the gas pedal with my right foot. Just under my right hand there was a panel of switches for an oil pressure gauge and a temperature gauge and a “mag switch,” the on/off electrical connection. Nothing fancy, just raw engine, propeller and boat.
I had worked at a Country and Western radio station in Akron, Ohio, which was called the Capital of West Virginia due to the number of tire and rubber workers from that state. I sold hillbilly radio advertising. My boss was a 260lb. guy who was a sport model. He liked the ponies, steaks at the Diamond Grill, negotiating with crooked religious broadcasters, playing golf and selling advertising. He had done some boxing before he went to spandex pants, and was a tough, funny guy. He loved practical jokes, and caught me many times. We got along fine. I was only 21, his top salesman and a fair golfer and Dewar’s Scotch drinker. We played liar’s poker many nights after work. To make things interesting, I bought an old Rolls Royce and took clients to the Akron Civic Center to see Roger Miller and Little Jimmy Dickens and Johnny Cash. We had a lot of fun in those days, and though radio “spots” were only $12 each, I made a good living for a young, single guy.
A few years later I had moved to Florida and was the owner of a couple of boat sales businesses in Pompano Beach. I got a call from the old boss, Dick, saying he was coming to the area and wanted to have some fun. He’s heard all my bullshit about south Florida outdoors. Now he wanted to see some. Naturally, the airboat seemed like the best way to show him a unique, exciting time, and maybe get in some payback for all his jokes when he was my boss.
We ended up in the Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge west of Pompano Beach, in my airboat. It was late in the afternoon. We took off into the sawgrass marsh to see what we could see before dark.
On the water that winter day were hundreds of thousands of coots, small ducklike, black birds. I’ve heard that they migrate to Florida, but it’s hard to imagine them migrating. They can’t fly worth a darn, and seem to have difficulty getting airborne, flapping their stiff little wings like crazy to gain altitude. They’re stay close to the surface of the water when they do fly, so if you’re cruising in an airboat at speed you can easily run into them before they can get out of the way. That’s the fun part. By driving at just the right speed you can sometimes position a flock of birds so that they’re flying at the same height off the water as the passenger, who sits in a seat below the driver’s. The first thing a coot wants to do when he gets airborne is take a dump, so a skillful driver can position a few birds in the air just in front of the guest at that important instant, which is what I did to Dick. Quite naturally, he waved his hands in front of him to ward off the birds, and after a few had shit on him I stopped the boat, apologized and explained that you never know what a wily coot will do, and let him clean up with a towel. So sorry, it was out of my control.
We continued on through the swamp, which had maybe the largest population of really big alligators in Florida. As we ran down the major east/west canal where alligators liked to sun themselves, at least twenty gators over eight feet long rushed into the water from their perches on the canalbank, ten feet away. A few were as big as they get, 12 feet long. They hit the water with a mighty splash, sometimes so close to the speeding boat that the water spashed in the boat, on Dick, who was clearly amazed and frightened at seeing the big reptiles up close. He was gesturing wildly to me, his eyes wide, hollering something I couldn’t hear, but I kept the boat on course until we came out on the open marsh. I was having lots of fun and it wasn’t even dark yet.
Once again I stopped and explained how we had to run close to that particular canal bank, and that the alligators were not trying to jump into the boat, but were trying to get out of our way. I’m not sure he was totally convinced, but he was a tough guy—a little pale but not about to admit that he was scared. We toweled off again and proceeded, enjoying the spectacle of thousands of birds of all sizes; herons, egrets, marsh hens, black birds, and the occasional raccoon. Just before dark we saw a swarm of swallows preparing to roost, thousands of tiny birds, all spiraling down in a tornado-like funnel to land in a cluster of myrtle bushes. It was a warm winter evening, and Dick settled down as we cruised slowly across the marsh. Wearing a set of ear protectors against the noise of the engine, wind in his face and a world of birds and wildlife before him everywhere he looked, he seemed to be having a grand time, though I noticed that his knuckles were white on the arms of his seat. We stopped a few more times, shut down the engine and listened to the sounds of the marsh while we drank martinis from thermos bottles. We waited for dark.
At night the marsh changed dramatically. The cone of light from my headlight was the only illumination. I decided to get a few frogs to eat, and used my frog gig to spear a few while Dick watched. My frog gig was a ten foot bamboo pole with four straightened #5 saltwater fishing hooks screwed on the end, making a circle of barbed mini-spears.
Easing the boat along in the lily pads and down the shoreline, I shone the bright light looking for the reflection in a frog’s eyes. The light makes them easy to see, and once the light hits them, frogs, like deer, are “frozen” by the light. Maneuvering the boat so that it was up on plane, not pushing a bow wake at about two miles an hour, I’d slide the gig out over the bow of the boat and stick the frog with the barbed hooks, then slide the pole through my right hand until the speared frog was positioned over a section of PVC pipe wired under my seat. Attached under the pipe was a burlap bag to hold the frogs. With my left, gloved hand, I’d pull the frogs from the gig and let them drop down the chute into the bag. To get the live, kicking frogs to the chute, I had to slide the pole close to Dick, sitting lower and in front of me. Sometimes there was marsh grass and a live frog. It was very dark. The boat was turning quickly in different directions to gig the frogs. Great Blue Herons and big white Common Egrets flew out of the grass just feet from the boat, coots darted ahead in the water, spider webs and spiders as big as your palm shone in the light. It must have been wild for Dick.
Like the frogs, alligators’ eyes shine in the dark, which makes them easy to see. For extra fun I caught a couple of alligators with my hands, which sounds scary, but it’s not. I’d cruise up alongside a small alligator, keeping the light in its eyes while it was trying to swim away, then let go of the steering and step down on the bow and reach down and grab it just behind the head and lift it from the water. A three foot gator is about as big as you want for this trick. Dick was hemmed in by the big engine behind him and the marsh all around him, or I’m sure he’d have jumped and run. He was not even mildly interested in seeing the gators up close, or in holding one. He was glued to his seat. When I stopped the boat and poured more martinis he admitted to being “scared shitless” by alligators and snakes. He looked near panic.
Snakes’ eyes don’t shine, but there are plenty to see at night in the Loxahatchee Refuge. I can differentiate between harmless water snakes and Cottonmouth Moccasins, but Dick couldn’t, and when I lifted one about four feet long out of the water with the gig and started to bring it towards the boat, I could hear Dick’s screaming moan over the noise of the engine, so I shook the snake off the gig and let it go overboard. He pounded on my knee and urged me to stop the boat, which I did. I shut off the engine and the light and Dick told me that he was going to beat the living shit out of me if I ever did that again. I said that I wouldn’t, and apologized and put the gig away and said that we’d just cruise and enjoy the night. Dick said he was ready to go home, so I said that we would. Maybe I’d gone too far? Oh, no. Not yet.
On the way back to the boat ramp, along an edge of the marsh I was very familiar with, I took the boat up to around forty miles an hour for a few minutes, then, without warning I put the boat into a 360 degree spin, which makes the boat tilt up on one side and come swooshing down, throwing a huge wall of water. It was all over in a few seconds. Dick was hanging on for dear life, not knowing what had happened. The instant the boat settled, without warning, I flipped the mag switch, shutting down the engine and the light. Silence. Dead in the water. Just us, mud, sawgrass, gators, snakes and darkness. Dick said, “Jesus, Mother of God! What the hell happened?”
I explained that I wasn’t sure what had happened, that it had scared me just as much as it had him. “The boat somehow went out of control,” I said. Dick was plainly terrified. I could hear it in his voice.
What to do? It was clearly an emergency situation. We were miles from the boat ramp, I explained. I found a flashlight and started flipping switches, checking the engine and battery connections from inside the boat. No luck. I fiddled with tools and tugged and sprayed WD-40. Nothing. Night noises of the swamp were all around us. Dick wanted to know if I thought alligators and snakes would come to the boat. I told him I wasn’t sure, but that he should hold his feet up off the bottom of the boat in case a snake did slip aboard. After a half hour of pretending to try and get the boat started again I stepped out of the boat into about a foot of water and grass and mud, and I tied on a bow line and started sloshing ahead, pulling the boat through the swamp. Dick held the flashlight. The batteries were getting low. He thought I was crazy. I said that we could be out there for days if we didn’t tow the boat back in, and that the gators and snakes usually stayed away from people and boats. Dick had read stories about Floridians whose arms had been ripped off, and about a 6 ft, 200lb man near Sarasota who was drowned by a big gator. I suggested to Dick that we’d get back a lot faster if he got out and helped me tow the boat, but he was quick to say there was no effing way he’d get in that water. He wanted to know how far we were in the swamp and when sunrise was.
After leisurely towing us along for fifteen minutes or so I got back in the boat to “check something,” and found that the boat started right up, mysteriously. Cheers and huzzahs! We were back in action. Dick was all smiles. I thought he was going to cry with joy. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” he said.
On the way back to the boat ramp we saw more gators and birds and snakes, but we arrived without another mishap, and got the airboat back on the trailer. Once the boat was tied down and we were preparing to leave the ramp area I asked Dick to untie the burlap bag of frogs from the plastic chute and put them on ice in my beer cooler while I put other things away. He used the flashlight and got hold of the neck of the frog bag, with maybe thirty frogs in it, and opened the cooler lid and was dumping them into the cooler when suddenly a big wet, bloody bullfrog jumped out on the front of his sweatshirt and stuck there.
He hollered and took off running across the parking lot swiping at the front of his shirt like it was on fire. Dick didn’t know to put the entire bag of frogs on ice. Once they’re cold they don’t jump around.
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