Canoeing can be fun, but forget the six-pack

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 23, 2000

When is a six-pack not a six-pack?

When it represents $840 in fines.

No, I didn't get stuck for that much. I decided to obey the law so I didn't have to worry about it.

The urge to canoe struck me and a friend when we found ourselves with time on our hands in Dunnellon.

Okay, more specifically, the urge struck her.

Since my last canoe trip was a five-day trek up the Withlacoochee River (Yes, I know my colleague Dan Dewitt can make the same trip in less than a day, but he's younger, in better shape and actually used both hands to paddle and neither to drink beer), I have mixed emotions.

In all it was a beautiful trip on which I met some wonderful people, but I also have memories of serious sunburn, deerfly bites and the hard knocks school of learning how to, well, relieve oneself from a canoe. (I am now only expert in that practice for men. Women tell me they simply explode rather than try.)

But I was ready to try again after a mere 14-year layoff.

At first I remembered the horror stories I had heard about how dried-up the Withlacoochee was and how you could spend as much time there carrying your canoe as paddling it.

But the Rainbow River, which meets the Withlacoochee at Dunnellon, is spring-fed, where the Withlacoochee depends mostly on runoff from the Green Swamp.

And that meant plenty of water.

Friends of mine have canoed and tubed the Rainbow for years, always inviting me to come, although I didn't ever, so visiting the Marion County Park at K.P. Hole was a first for me.

It's a nice, well-run little park where you quickly and efficiently and for not much money can rent a canoe or an inner tube and hit the river.

The smart money, if your shoulder muscles are over 40 and your hair has seen thicker days, is on wearing a hat and paddling against the flow of the river north to Rainbow Springs. Early in your trip you will be more up for the extra effort and, after you get to the springs and turn around, it's a nice drift back during which you only have to steer.

Except for swimming in the small Dunnellon City Beach well south of K.P. Hole, I had never really seen the Rainbow River, which has the same pristine, clear beauty of the Chassahowitzka and Weeki Wachee rivers and parts of the Homosassa River.

You can see the sandy bottom along large portions of the river, which is wide enough to accommodate heavy snorkel, scuba, powerboat, inner tube and canoe traffic.

We turned out to have hit the park at exactly the right time, before the morning rush, and were on the crystal clear 6-mile-long river when it was almost empty . . . although it and the park were full when we got back an hour or so later.

There are a lot of reasons to take a trip like that.

One is to remind yourself of how much beauty there is around here (especially if you pick your traveling companions carefully) and another is to get exercise, fresh air and sunshine, all at the same time.

But think twice about that six-pack . . . of anything. You aren't allowed to take any food or drink on the river in anything but a non-disposable container. And the fine, a park attendant told me, is $140 per item. I've had some six-packs that were worth $5 or $6, but none worth $840.

I managed to survive on bottled water without any major withdrawal symptoms and worked up a good appetite for some of the Dinner Bell Motel's world-class fried chicken when we got back to Dunnellon.

The payoff is that in 6 miles of river, we didn't see one scrap of garbage. In fact, the only thing I saw that didn't belong was a plastic squirt gun floating merrily down the river.

And I realized that being puzzled about that was the largest psychological challenge I had faced for nearly two hours.

I guess that's why they call it recreation.

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