: That's the story I got with the E-mail. I'll did around my messages later and
: see if I can find the story.

: Dale

This pic and the golf story circulated around the "email circuit" in Florida several years ago and did not correspond to any reported attacks. Although we could be wrong, we never saw an official story and those of us who talked about it concluded that the story was a hoax. If the picture is real my guess is that it is a crocodile and did not occur in the wilds of North America.

Gator attacks on adults in Florida are very rare. I see and hear dozens of gators weekly on my regular training paddle on the Saint John's river. They can be a little aggressive during the Spring and I have had one encounter where a large one followed me for a short while and another encounter where a very large gator held his "ground" in a small stream and hissed at me, forcing me to retreat and use an alternate route.

Usually a gator will do anything possible to get out of your way, which sometimes gets your heart racing as their frantic dash to escape creates a sudden tail-thrashing "depth-charge" explosion of water off your bow. Then theres that time that I rammed one once, mistaking its mud covered back for a place to beach the kayak for some lunch...

If the gators are accustomed to the bang-boom-cussing-shouting-gawd-awful-blaring-radio pandemonium of a typical rental canoe fleet then you can sneak up on them easily if you are quiet. My typical gator interaction is that they see you coming from a distance and simply sink out of sight as you approach. I enjoy seeing them in the same way that seeing eagles, hawks and otter are a treat.

In a nutshell treat them with respect and don't take your dog camping with you (dogs are a gator delicacy). Keep children away from the water. Don't feed gators (don't laugh people toss them junk food all the time). Having a gator associate humans with food is a terribly bad combination and will likely result in the gator losing its fear of humans and being trapped and killed.

I found it humorous during a trip to the Pukaskwa area of Lake Superior in Canada, that I was worried about bears (since very few are left in Florida) and was asking the ranger about the dangers . The conversion went something like "Please tell me about the bears". "Bears? Ahhhh. Don't worry about the bears, tell me about the gators". "Gators? No problem, tell me about the bears....". And so it went ;^)

Greg Stamer