The adventures of a Florida boy (part 8)

In the 1960s, kids ran as far and wild as their imaginations would take them

ONE OF AN OCCASIONAL SERIES: My boyhood was spent in Florida in the 1960s on an island called Coquina Key. My parents’ waterfront home overlooked a large expanse of Tampa Bay. Back then, parts of the island were undeveloped, which left plenty of room for climbing trees, digging forts in the sand, and swimming in shark-infested waters (though we didn’t give the latter much thought).

This is part 8 of a random and mostly light-hearted series that I might eventually combine into a memoir. I’m telling these stories to the best of my recollection and changing names and physical descriptions just because it seems like the right thing to do.

SEA CREATURES, LARGE AND SMALL!

If you’ve been reading this series, I would assume by now you’ve gotten the impression that I spent a lot of time around and in saltwater when I was a boy. Tampa Bay was literally in my back yard, but I also spent countless wonderful hours frolicking in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. I swam, fished, and zoomed around on boats. And I encountered a wide array of sea creatures, varying in size from minnows to manta rays (more on the latter is yet to come).

I’ve mentioned this in past episodes, but I did things when I was 10 to 15 years old that I wouldn’t dare do now. Something as simple as walking around barefoot in the brackish waters of Tampa Bay would scare the crap out of me. Back then, we thought nothing of it, despite a slew of reasons why it wasn’t wise to walk barefoot in waist-deep water when you couldn’t see the bottom. Here are just a few:

To bare feet, horseshoe crabs were as harmless as a pile of broken glass. Credit: DepositPhotos

Sharks.

Sting rays.

Jellyfish.

Barnacles.

Horseshoe crabs.

Anemones

You name it.

But during my wanderings, there was rarely a time when I didn’t see something interesting. For instance, back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, enormous schools of mullet—thousands and thousands strong—used to congregate in the channels. The schools were so dense, the mullets’ heads would literally rise above the surface. Dolphins would feast on them, often leaping high into the air and crashing down upon their prey.

It was also a feast for a boy with a fishing pole and a snatch hook. The Chinese husband and wife who lived at the end of our road paid me good money for a freshly snagged mullet—25 cents a pop! They became accustomed to me knocking on their front door with a fresh fish in a bucket. I loved them. And they loved me.

Speaking of dolphins, they were everywhere—and I adored them. During high tide, they would often swim right up to my seawall, turn on their sides, and smile at me. When I swam in the channel with my friends, dolphins would surface as close as ten feet away, and despite their formidable size and shark-like appearance, it didn’t scare us in the least. We swam toward them as fast as we could in hopes of touching them, but they were far too clever. To them, it must have seemed like we were swimming in mud.

To be honest, we didn’t see many sharks—at least, big ones. There were plenty of sand sharks, but they were rarely more than five feet long and more commonly three feet or less, so we paid them little heed. I’m sure there were big sharks hidden by the brackish water, but I never had a close call, at least of which I was aware.

Photo by Keith Champaco on Unsplash

One morning, my friend and I went onto his dock to have a look around. It was low tide. A damp beach extended about twenty feet from the seawall to the water’s edge. To our amazement, we saw a sea turtle lying on the sand. It was about the size of the hood of a car. We immediately leaped down to investigate, expecting the turtle to clamber off. But when we got a closer look, we saw that its head was scarred and bloodied. It might have been attacked by a shark, but more likely it had been struck by a boat propeller. Either way, it was dead.

We told my friend’s parents about it, and they called a wildlife rehabilitation center and asked if they might want to come and get the turtle. Maybe they could study the carcass for scientific purposes and eventually put the shell on display. Sure enough, they were very interested. But they said they couldn’t haul it off until late in the afternoon. My friend and I were afraid the tide would come in and wash the turtle away, so we found a thin rope and tied one end to his dock and the other to one of the turtle’s fins. After that, we went off to play.

Later that day, we went back to check on it. Unbelieveably, the turtle was gone. The rope had been stretched all the way to the water’s edge. As it turned out, the turtle wasn’t dead and had crawled back to the bay. This made us happy.

(We left the rope there so the wildlife scientists wouldn’t think we were nuts for calling them.)

Of all the marvelous creatures I encountered, one stood above the rest. My sister, who is four years older, had a boyfriend with a fancy speedboat—I believe a 22-footer. And she talked him into taking her, my friend, and me into the Gulf of Mexico to do some fishing and just have fun. At one point, we were cruising along when I noticed what appeared to be a pair of sharks swimming side by side about thirty feet apart. The weird thing was, their fins surfaced and then disappeared, over and over again. We all became curious, so the intrepid boyfriend drove his boat over to check it out.

Manta rays can have wingspans of close to thirty feet and can weigh more than 6,000 pounds. Credit: DepositPhotos

What we found remains to this day one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. It wasn’t a pair of sharks at all. Rather, it was the wing tips of a manta ray that had to be almost thirty feet wide and long (including its tail), and five feet thick. And it probably weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of three tons.

We approached within a stone’s throw. The manta ray, of course, didn’t appreciate this. So it swung one of its massive wings down like a jet fighter and dove beneath the surface. The resulting suction nearly capsized us. If we had been in a smaller boat, it certainly would have.

We followed the humongous creature around for more than an hour. They say that cobia—a delicious-tasting fish—hang out beneath huge manta rays, eating the scraps the rays leave behind. If you cast onto the ray’s back, the bait will roll off the side and be snapped up by the cobia. But to be honest, the manta ray was so big, we were too scared to cast onto it. We didn’t want to make it even angrier than it already was.

Eventually, the manta ray dove beneath the surface and disappeared. We hung out for a while in hopes of seeing it again, but we never did.

Back then, there was no such thing as cellphones, and we didn’t have an ordinary camera with us, so I have no official record of it other than in my head. Oh, and in the heads of three fellow witnesses.

They say some manta rays can live as long as seventy-five years. So in theory, the behemoth we saw more than fifty years ago might still be alive today.

If so, I would love to see it one last time.

The adventures of a Florida boy — past episodes

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7

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