- April 26, 2024
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There’s a strategy to stepping from a canoe to a dock and staying dry.
Dogs, unfortunately, don’t know this.
I’d pulled my canoe alongside the dock at Bull Creek Fish Camp on Dead Lake Sunday morning when Tippy, a wiggling, licking, prancing 15-pound poodle pup I’d picked up from an Orlando-area rescue, demonstrated the point.
I was kneeling in the canoe, carefully setting fishing tackle on the dock with one hand and holding his lead with the other, when I felt the canoe push out sideways and looked up to see the dog suspended between dock and boat, front paws on the hard and back ones on the gunnel, body slowly stretching into a kind of doggy split in that infinite second before the inevitable splash.
I yanked the squirming pooch out of the tannin-stained water before one of the lake’s gators could make him breakfast.
It was the gators — or, really, the people who hunt them — that had brought me out to the fish camp.
Bull Creek Fish Camp is a jumping-off point for alligator hunters heading out to Crescent Lake, where they regularly snag 10-foot monsters. Gator hunting on Crescent Lake sounded like a good story: tough men and women heading off onto the pitch black water at night on little boats, using harpoons and snatch hooks to wrestle massive, writhing, scaly beasts — some weighing more than 400 pounds and more than the hunters’ boats — up from the depths of the lake.
But I had a problem. I’d want to hang around the ramp for at least one night and morning to see if anyone headed out — the chilly weather would slow down the gator action and deter all but a few diehards desperate to fill their quota before the season ends Nov. 1 — and I couldn’t leave the pup home alone from Saturday evening to Sunday afternoon. He’d have to come along.
The fish camp was near-deserted when I pulled in around dusk toting dog and canoe, except for the several pairs of orange-red eyes that peered back at me when I turned a headlamp toward the far side of the canal along the boat ramp.
Tippy and I spent the night camped out on the canoe not far from the ramp on Dead Lake, anchored close to a stand of cypress draped with Spanish moss.
On the paddle out, the dog tried to do what dogs do in cars, leaning blissfully out into the wind. I counted gators — five by the time we anchored — and scolded him to keep nose and body fully inside the vehicle.
Enforcing this rule in a canoe, without the benefit of power windows, was a bit tough.
I was glad for the sturdy vessel’s high sides. Seated or lying in the center of the canoe — a 17-foot long, 3-foot wide, 85-pound tank of a paddling vessel that can haul three people and camping gear— the little dog would have been invisible from the water.
By the time we headed in the next morning and Tippy took his dockside spill, we’d missed a group of hunters heading out. The boat of hunters — regulars, according to County Park Ranger Earl Hackett — had motored out around 6 a.m. while Tippy and I snoozed.
They returned at 10 a.m., four camouflage-clad people in a camouflage-painted johnboat who’d had no more luck getting gators than I’d had finding gator hunters.
But the trip wasn’t a loss. Tippy and I hopped back into the canoe and headed down Dead Lake and out into Crescent Lake. We pushed toward Bear Island in the center of the lake — Tippy reveling in the stiff headwind, me cursing it for the beating it was giving my arm muscles — passing boats of fisherman casting for brim and bass.
Two bald eagles drifted over the cypresses on the east shore. Red-eared slider turtles plopped into the water from their perches on overturned trees. Herons and cormorants preened on the decaying remnants of an old pier.
Gators resting alongside the bank crashed into the water, then submerged toward the safety of the lake bottom, as the boat drifted past. My gator count for the day reached 12 by the time we made it back to the ramp around dark.
And though we didn’t find any hunters, the dog and I came out with an accomplishment: We both made it back on land with dry feet.
