Day 6: A Lighthearted Look at Life on the Wild Side of Florida

By Don Jacobs

This is a lively look at a disappearing outdoor lifestyle located in the shadow of the mega-tourist theme parks. It is a lighthearted but sometimes serious account of hunting alligators, wild hogs, fishing, riding horses, raising kids, finding fossils, arrowheads, and more--all on the wild side of rural Central Florida. Don has found more adventures in the swamps, lakes, and woods around his home than on any attraction ride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662478543

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Day 6

A Lighthearted Look at Life on the Wild Side of Florida

Don Jacobs

Copyright © 2022 Don Jacobs

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

ISBN 978-1-6624-7853-6 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-7854-3 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

It's a Dangerous Place

The Rogue

Lake Jesup BULL Hunting

The Garfish Gig Is Up

Taken at Night

Wink Eye Nightmare

El Negro Grande

Dawg Hunting

Dream Buck

The Appointment

Kids of the Woods

The Big Fish

How Not To…

Catch 'Em! Catch 'Em!

Better Lucky Than Good!

Fish Fry Roundup

Being Watched

Coyotes

Possum Prank

Snipe Hunting

Cracker Cow Whips

Falling Off

Norman

Ice Age Discovery

How Old Is That?

Spearhead

Buried Treasure

A Place in Time

On Top

Move, You Lose!

Lost Little Girl

Lake Pickell (Lake Pickett)

Shrimping

Hooked

Team Sailfish

I Am the Son of a Son…

The End?

Day 6 Life

Epilogue: Living in the Gap

About the Author

A Lighthearted Look at Life on the Wild Side of Florida

Preface

Most tourists probably come to Central Florida on vacation to go to one of the many theme parks, like Disney or Universal, or to one of our beautiful beaches. After about a week, they might say something like, It's a nice place to visit, but I would not want to live there. In their minds, they have had enough of the traffic, crowds of people, long lines, the heat, and $5 bottled water.

There is no easy way to experience the wild side of Florida without knowing someone willing to take you there. Yes, the beaches and some of the rivers are accessible to see our natural beauty, but the major attractions are only able to give you the user-friendly side of Florida, protecting the average family from any real danger or harm.

Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen and make the national news. Florida Man stories seem to pop up regularly, but what I am talking about are the alligator attacks, hurricanes, shark bites, lost in swamp, lightning-capital-of-the-world type stories.

With this in mind, here are a few real-life, sometimes lighthearted, experiences I lived on the wild side of Florida.

It's a Dangerous Place

I knew I was being hit by lightning. I shook violently as the muscles in my entire body vibrated. I wanted it to end. I passed out thinking that this was what it was like to die. I was surprised to be able to open my eyes. I was lying face down in three inches of water. I had survived!

My first instinct was to get up and go inside if I could. I was able to stand. I was covered in mud and soaking wet. I turned to run for the door of our family's truck camper. I reached for the door and incredibly, I was struck a second time!

Earlier that day, we took a pleasant trip to Jetty Park near Port Canaveral. I enjoyed fishing off the rocks that lined the inlet. I had two long surf rods that I cast into the deep channel that ran in front of the campground where we parked. My mom and dad decided we could spend the night in our camper at Jetty Park Campground. I was going to meet some friends who were not coming over until tomorrow morning to fish. Late that afternoon, a very serious thunderstorm approached and pressed me off the rocks and back into the safety of our camper. Mom was fixing supper, and we sat inside and watched the lightning fill the evening sky like it was the Fourth of July. The rains and wind beat against our small shelter, and we ate a very unsettled meal. The lights went off and on several times. Thunderclaps from the lightning shook our truck. We were up on four rubber tires, but that didn't give us much comfort.

The lightning and rain continued for more than an hour but, eventually, began to settle down. It was still raining slightly when my dad decided to venture out for a walk before going to bed. After a couple of minutes, I decided to go outside also, and see how the area faired after the violent attack from above.

I don't have perfect recall of exactly how I nearly got electrocuted. Twice. Both times I felt my body reacting to the volts of energy surging through me. Both times I was knocked unconscious, and I was thrown backward into a mudhole full of water.

The door to the camper was wide open, and it was then that I realized that my mom had been a witness to the entire thing. She was screaming my name and yelling for me to come back to her and the safety of the camper.

The chances of me getting struck by lightning twice in one night and surviving both times were pretty slim. By now I had figured out that something else must be going on. When I touched the metal handle of the door with my feet on wet ground, I was being shocked, not hit by lightning! I had become a conduit for energy that somehow had gone haywire because of the storm. Perhaps a bolt had hit a transformer and blew something out. I may never know.

My mom was becoming hysterical. She yelled, Get back in here now!

I was only fourteen, and I did not know anything about electricity; but I was a quick study when the lesson is reinforced with electric shock. I told her there was no way I was going to try to get strapped back into that electric chair of a camper.

She immediately had a plan. Come close, take my hands, don't touch the metal, and I will help you in.

Seemed reasonable enough. I reached up for her hands, being careful not to touch the door entrance. When we touched, it felt like a third lightning bolt had hit both of us. She went backward and landed on her tailbone, and I revisited my now-familiar landing spot, in the mud.

Dad returned shortly, and we told him what was happening. He ventured to the side where the camper was connected by a heavy cable to the power source. He took a chance and quickly unplugged the cable and things returned to normal, except our lights were out. A quick decision was made to pack up and return home immediately. It was so shocking that we did not stop to ask for a refund.

Later that year, I had another close call when I took a shop class that included welding. My project was to build an equipment trailer for my dad's tractor business. He bought all the metal and hardware that was needed and coordinated everything with my shop teacher, Mr. Wayne Lanham, who was also a friend of our family. During the semester, under his instruction, I cut and welded the metal, added axels and wheels and all the hardware needed. I got an A in the class, but the project was not completed. I took the trailer home to our barn to finish attaching the metal decking to the frame I built at school. It was summer and hot. I clamped the metal decking to the frame with vice grips. Then I attached the ground clamp of the welder to the trailer. I sat down on the metal trailer to get into position to make my next weld. Unfortunately, my pants were wet with sweat. When I touched the welding rod to the trailer, somehow, the high voltage began passing through my body. I instantly knew I was in trouble, but I could not do anything about it. Apparently, my muscles reacted and luckily threw the electrode out of my hand, and it landed safely on the ground. This time, I was not knocked unconscious, but I knew I had dodged another lightning bolt of sorts. I was told that if I had not been able to drop the welding electrode, I would not be writing this account.

About a year later, my buddy Mike and I decided to spend the night fishing on an island at the intercoastal waterway near Ponce Inlet. We packed up his dad's johnboat with our camping gear and our fishing tackle and took off. The boat ramp was near the coast guard station at New Smyrna, and we motored out to a spit of sand where Mike had caught some fish before. Our camp was on a high spot, and we built a little fire. The air was clear and cold. The full moon came up as the sun was going down. We fished the outgoing tide and decided to try to get a few winks of sleep and fish early the next morning. Our gear was placed up near the tent. As an afterthought, we decided to pull the boat way up out of the water by the tent, so no one would be tempted to borrow it while we slept. I laughed as I threw the anchor out on the sand.

Mike remarked, What, do you think it's going to float away?

Ha, ha. I crawled into the tent to get out of the wind. I was tired and cold, and the warm sleeping bag helped me go right to sleep. Mike also curled up in his bag to get an early start in the morning.

I was awakened by freezing cold water flushing in all around my sleeping bag. The tide had come in with a vengeance, aided by the wind and full moon. The rising water had erased everything around us that used to be dry land when we hit the sack. We quickly fumbled out of our wet bags and unzipped the tent entrance to see our campsite inundated with salt water. It was still dark, but the horizon was showing signs of sunrise. Our gear was floating away.

Mike and I grabbed everything we could find and threw it into the boat, including our wadded-up tent and sleeping bags. The boat's anchor line was tight, but the anchor had held long enough for us to wake up. I do not do well when wet and cold. Shivering, my jaw was starting to lock up so that I could not speak, and I was almost incapacitated. I tumbled into the bow of the small boat as Mike cranked the engine and headed for the boat ramp. The wind was blowing salt water over the sides of the boat. I stumbled out of the boat back at the ramp, and we ran to the truck. We tried to get dry and warm by the truck's heater. If it had not been for Mike that morning, I may have been overcome by hypothermia on what I now understand is called disappearing island. I am not sure he was being heroic. He may have just been afraid to tell his dad that he had lost the boat and all the camping gear.

As a kid growing up in Florida, I almost enjoyed the excitement of an approaching hurricane. The changing weather seemed to make the wild animals more active out on the ranch. It seemed they were also in storm preparation mode, busy eating their last meal before everything went underwater.

Our own September 11, 1960, Hurricane Donna slammed into Central Florida. That is the storm that everyone used as a benchmark to measure every storm that hit since then. People would say things like, Well, it was bad, but not nearly as bad as Hurricane Donna in 1960!

After forty-four years of hearing that, we set another benchmark. The year 2004 was a year for the record books. There were four powerful hurricanes that hit Florida in just a few months. On Friday the thirteenth, in August, Hurricane Charlie roared in out of the gulf. He was a fast-moving storm that followed the exact path of Donna. With little notice, we invited my elderly Aunt Ina to shelter in our home. We spent the next four hours listening to roar of a freight train outside as we huddled in an interior bedroom closet. We prayed the storm would not consume in one night everything we had worked a lifetime to possess. It beat us with powerful winds but brought little rain. Afterward, I climbed around in the dark to review the damage. There was a miracle. Our house was okay, but we lost seventeen large oak trees, blown over by the root ball by the high winds.

I had a rental house in nearby Oviedo. When I checked on the tenants, they were in shock. The property was covered in storm debris, and their Mercedes was crushed by a fallen tree.

I told them, If you can be patient with me, I will get this mess cleaned up.

They said, Don, we are just glad to be alive.

I spent the next few weeks cleaning up and patching damaged roofs. Gas generators helped keep food frozen and a few lights on. The power was out for two weeks.

That wasn't the end. On September 5, Hurricane Frances came in off the eastern coast, followed up on September 16 by Hurricane Ivan, and then the super-soaker Hurricane Jeanne on September 25. By then, water was everywhere. I was officially over being excited by approaching hurricanes.

Things in life could have changed in the blink of an eye. It truly is a game of inches. On one stormy night at Jetty Park, on three occasions, I could have been killed or disabled. A year later while welding, the electrode could have frozen in my grip or landed on the metal trailer. That lonely night on a spit of sand, I could have been overcome with hypothermia and been swept out to sea. Hurricanes sounded like fun until you live through a bad one.

Below is a partial list of other close calls that could have changed my life forever:

Brothers teaching me to swim and nearly drowning

Gulping gas to start a siphon

Scuba diving gulp mishaps. Drowning

Mishaps wrestling wild hogs including stitches

Dog bites and cow encounters while hog hunting

Countless snake bites near misses in creeks and rivers while hunting, fishing, and frog gigging

Alligator hunting is very safe, well, except when…

Horse not riding. Almost broken neck, back

Air boat prop shatters

Working cows, broken nose, wrestling calves

What's the next adventure? Life is a rhythm often tied to the seasons. I enjoy each winter, spring, summer, and fall. Perhaps at this stage of my life it is less about me, and more about sharing some of this with others. This is written to remind myself and the reader that life can be brief, though my life has not been. I am not a hero. I have never served in the military and faced down death with heroic bravery. I am not a fireman or a police officer. Neither am I a daredevil, looking for ways to put my life in peril. I enjoy a good dose of adrenaline occasionally, but do not consider myself foolhardy. I have found contentment within my boundaries, but someone said, Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

The Rogue

Breaking News! Man attacked by alligator on Lake Jesup!

I took special interest in the news as my friends asked me if I had seen what had happened. I followed the story closely because I knew I would be hunting that same area in less than two weeks. As I pieced the story together, it went something like this.

Three buddies from a town up north of here came down to hunt on Lake Jesup. The season started on August 15, 2020, at five o'clock in the afternoon. On the afternoon of the twentieth, they launched their boat from a site on the north side off Sanford Avenue and were hunting on the south end of the lake. They were just east of the 417 bridges when they saw a giant alligator on the surface and were able to hook it with a rod and reel. They got it up close and added two harpoons with lines and tied the gator to the boat. At some point, one of the men reached for a line. The gator thrust with his tail and propelled up out of the water and grabbed the man by the right arm, just below the elbow, and almost twisted it off. The hunters had a medical emergency a long way from the nearest hospital. They were professional first responders, and one of the men jammed a rod end into the mouth of the gator to prevent it from rolling further. Luckily, the gator released its grip and went back into the water. They cut the two harpoon lines that tethered the gator to the boat and immediately began using their medical training to save the man's life. They used their cell phones to call for help and raced the boat back to the ramp. I think the man was airlifted by helicopter to the emergency room. Fortunately, the doctor's discovered that some of the nerve endings were still attached and, after six hours of surgery, were able to reattach the arm. In TV interviews with the man, the feelings had returned to his fingertips, and he was optimistic that he would recover over time with lots of therapy. He said he would not be hunting alligators again, at his wife's request.

I now had a mission. I wanted to catch the Rogue alligator. I reread every account of the accident looking for all the details. A professional alligator trapper had been called in the next day, and he captured an eleven-foot alligator near the area; but some of the details just did not add up.

My first shot at the Rogue came on Saturday, August 29. I had two buddies with me, Paul and John. We also met three men from Clearwater, who had driven over two hours to hunt after getting drawn for this area in the lottery. They had an aluminum boat that looked about eighteen-foot long with a black kicker that was keel steered. They were new to the lake but were experienced alligator hunters.

It was very windy that afternoon and about to storm, but this was the first day of our hunts and we were anxious to get on the water. Along with about five other boats of hunters, we headed away from the ramp around at six o'clock. Because of the approaching storms, I considered going north into the Lake Harney hunting section. Paul had been drawn for that section, so we could go either way. But I was drawn to the lore of going after the Rogue despite the dangers of the weather.

We started hunting toward the south along the eastern shore of the lake. We were about two miles south of the bridge, and I began to regret my decision. Had I misjudged the intensity and danger of the early evening thunderstorm? The wind had picked up significantly, and there was plenty of lightning and dark heavy rainclouds coming right at us. I had to make a decision. Do we try to run back to the boat ramp and wait the storm out in the safety our trucks? Or should we try to outrun the storm by heading south and cutting underneath it as it passed across the northern edge of the lake. I took the riskier approach and headed south. I apologized to Paul and John for putting them in this precarious position. They laughed nervously, and I am sure they questioned their own judgment for coming with me, privately amongst themselves.

We ran wide open for about six miles and arrived at the south end of the lake where we could take shelter under the 417 Bridges. Seems like everyone else had the same idea as boat after boat slid into hiding under the bridge. It was starting to get dark at about eight fifteen. The lights on the bridge were coming on, but you could still see colors.

Then I noticed the three guys from Clearwater were already under the bridge. One was maneuvering the boat to keep it off the concrete pilings under the bridge in the stiff wind. Then I noticed another man was on the bow with a heavy rod bent, aimed down under the boat. It was obvious that they had hooked a gator, and it was giving them a fit under the bridge. It must have been a whopper because it went anywhere it wanted, and the little boat had trouble keeping up as the gator moved in and out of the bridge pilings. We stayed a safe distance away so as not to interfere