Area Covered: In: Riverbreeze Park, Intracoastal Waterway, to Jones's Canal, exploring.
Out: Exploring and returning the same way.
Distance Covered: 6 Miles?
Outdoortravels Rating: 3 out of 5 Paddles
What You Need: You'll need mosquito coils, and repellent along with socks, a long sleeved shirt and pants for wearing around camp in the evenings - year round. Bring all the water you'll need. There are no sources of fresh water in Mosquito Lagoon. Sunblock is a must. Fires are generally allowed in designated fire rings.
Thumbs Up:
- Relative solitude in Mosquito Lagoon
- Abundance of aquatic life and opportunities for bird watching
- Manatees and dolphins are often spotted
- Clean and neat campsites
Thumbs Down:
- Jones's Canal Campsite not marked, could be hard to find
- Intracoastal Waterway is suited for motorboats, not canoes, but is a necessary evil in order to exit or enter certain parts of CNS from the western portion of the park.
- Depending on the time of year it could be mosquito heaven.
Lessons Learned:
- Plan ahead. No matter how smart you believe you are, or how good you think you are at packing - start packing the night before and for God's sake, make a list of things you really need (like a map)!
- In Canaveral National Seashore, if you can't see your food, it's fare game for raccoons, no matter how close it is to you. Stash your food in a safe place or keep in sight always.
- Raccoons prefer bagels to Baked Lays Potato Chips.
Canaveral National Seashore Log
Militant Racoons Who Love Bagels
by: Dana Farnsworth
Day 1
If you've read our other canoe camping logs, you're familiar with my general failure to successfully canoe camp. Every time I've tried, something has gone wrong. This time, no thunderstorms or killer mosquitoes or crappy campsites were going to impede me from canoe camping. Little did I know I would actually need to make a huge effort to do something as simple as canoe camp. Saturday morning arrived as Kelli (my wife) and I began our gear preparations.
The first problem arose when I realized I had left my digital camera at work. No problem, a quick drive to my office while Kelli went to the grocery store and badda bing, first problem solved. I had a goal of leaving the house by 10:00 AM, which would lead to a 12:00 noon arrival at the visitor's center. As we were walking out the door at 10:00 AM, it looked as if everything was going smoothly. That was when Kelli asked me, "Do you have the National Park Pass"? Yikes, I didn't know where it was!
No problem, a quick search of my usual hiding places in the house would surely turn up the misplaced pass. Night stand drawer? Nope. Kitchen cabinet? Nope. Little box by the front door? Nope. Old wallet? Nope. Basket that holds the bills? Nope. The pass not only proved to be elusive, it also took up ten precious minutes just looking for it. Okay, "No problem" I thought as we left the driveway, "We can pay to get in, it's only $5 to get into the park anyway, no big deal."
We traveled exactly one block when I heard "Do you remember how to get there"? You guessed it, I couldn't remember and a quick search of the car didn't turn up my Florida road map. YAAARRRGGGHHH!!!! Okay, "Turn around, go back to the house, and find the map," I thought to myself. What actually came out of my mouth wasn't exactly what I was thinking though. What actually came out would have embarrassed a sailor. You guessed it; a run through of the house didn't turn up the map. "Someday I can laugh about this, maybe," I said to Kelli while fuming at my lack of preparation.
I'm sure you would like to read about Canaveral National Seashore and how nice it is, so I'll speed the next four hours up a little. If you are reading carefully, you just noticed that I had mentioned that Canaveral was only two hours from Tampa, and I just said "the next four hours." Yes, things didn't get any better. As we approached Orlando, I-4 became a parking lot. Movement was so slow that I got out to pee on a tree and returned to the car, got back on the road, and was only five or six cars back from where I got out of line. 40 miles turned into hours. At this point I was thinking that some strange alignment of forces happened when I put the canoe on the car AND the tent in the trunk. Possibly like two magnets being pressed together, the two items had some sort of opposite forces that made everything go wrong. I was about to admit defeat and call off canoeing and camping as one single adventure, forever!
Four hours after departing, we arrived at Canaveral National Sea Shore's Visitor's Center to claim our campsite. We were scheduled to stay at the Jones's Canal site for the night. It was located opposite the visitor's center on the eastern side of the park's lagoon. This meant another thirty-minute backtracking drive to Riverbreeze Park, where we were instructed to launch our canoe. As we drove by a giant sign that read "Riverwood Park," we wondered aloud if that was actually where we should go. After an additional five miles went by, we decided it was.
As we approached it for the second time we notice small brownish signs that read "Riverbreeze." They were dwarfed by the giant blue and white sign of Riverwood Park (one and the same). Problems aside, we were there, and it felt pretty good! I didn't want to get my hopes up, though, as our canoe could still sink. And there was that article I read about an alligator that bit a man's kayak recently. I remembered that Canaveral was too salty for alligators, so I could strike that off of my list of things that could still go wrong.
As we cast off from the boat ramp with our loaded canoe, we had a small sigh of relief. We only had about two miles to paddle to our campsite, and we still had plenty of daylight left. Paddling north, we chatted and had a few ice-cold beers. Life was good. We were paddling a section of the Intracoastal Waterway, which by all accounts wasn't incredibly interesting. We spotted a few pelicans while being sloshed around by some pretty sizable wake from boats. We did manage to find a section that ran along the right bank that sheltered us from the view of houses and motorboats. A little piece of land separated the river into two uneven parts for about a mile. This allowed us to relax and enjoy the tropical scenery, even if we had to get out and drag the boat across the end of the peninsula that we thought was an island.
After we passed marker R 70, I soon spotted the "Manatee No Wake Zone" sign the ranger described to me. This was my cue to enter Jones's Canal and find our site (number 5). After a few minutes of looking for a site marker, we decided to look around somewhere else for our elusive campsite. After a small loop around the area, we ended up where we started, still with no campsite to be found. Since it was time for urinary relief, we picked a nice sandy little beach area, with what looked to be a rope swing hanging in front of a little path. Seems our luck was turning around. This was no pee spot - it was our campsite!
For some reason this site has no marker in front of it. If you decide to camp at this spot, look for a rope hanging from a tree and a small sandy beach with a little path running into the woods behind it. It's almost immediately to your right as you enter Jones's canal. If that's not hard enough, Jones's canal has a fork at the beginning. You'll want to stay to the right channel as you enter.
The site was very nice. It had a little bit of sand, a nice clearing, a fire ring with cooking grate and a picnic table. I'm used to National Parks not allowing campfires, but apparently CNS does. I would call ahead and check with a ranger if you are planning on cooking over a fire, just in case it becomes restricted.
We unpacked our folding love seat, tent, air mattress and cooler and began setting up camp (canoe camping is great, because in a sizable canoe, you can lug all of those luxuries around with ease). As Kelli and I sat in our lounger relaxing, looking at the water, enjoying a cold one and chatting, we heard a rattling behind us. No, it wasn't a rattlesnake, a glance backward revealed a raccoon who had snuck up, not ten feet behind us, and snatched our sandwich buns and bagels. It certainly was our fault for leaving them out, even that close to us, but I still wished aloud that the little bastard would choke on the sesame bagel!
After putting our dry food and the cooler back into the canoe we set off for a little sunset cruise. We were finally in Mosquito Lagoon, away from the bustling Intracoastal Waterway. This area is why you want to go to CNS to kayak or canoe. It's a beautiful estuary-wetlands area that is full of wading birds, osprey, manatee, dolphins and more. Rarely does the depth exceed twenty feet; the most common depth being around one to two feet. This keeps larger boats out, and creates a great playground for canoeist and kayakers.
As I waded along the bank in front of our campsite, I marveled at the abundance of tiny blue crabs in the water and others burroughed into the sand on the banks. I also spotted several small fish swimming around the shallows. As I looked around for a suitable spot to take a picture of our campsite, a strange alien looking creature came flopping along the surface next to me. I yelled for Kelli to join me and see this hideous looking thing. Being a diver who loves to identify fish and sea creatures, I was both amazed and stumped as to what this thing was. It looked like a giant snail that had wings and no shell. We took a couple of pictures so that I could identify it later. After a check of my sea creature identification book, I was able to identify it as a sea hare (a shell-less snail), not a bad guess.
Our sunset paddle, (actually I was the one paddling), was highlighted by a stunning sunset over the mangroves as well as the opportunity to closely watch two raccoons wander along the shore, digging in the sand for an evening snack. Upon returning to our campsite we started a small fire, had a couple more cold brews and raccoon-proofed our site for the night. I put a paddle through the handles of the cooler (that kept it from being opened by anything this side of an opposable thumb attached to a really strong critter) and we brought our dry goods into the tent. I'm a veteran backpacker in several areas that would be considered bear country. I know that you should always bag and hang your food from a tree limb with a rope. Since CNS has no bears that I know of, I thought it safe to put our dry goods in the tent. As we sat in our tent chatting, I envisioned the raccoons in the woods with little plastic army helmets on, plotting their midnight clandestine assault on our campsite.
It wasn't long before we hear the clinking of beer bottles. As we peered out of the tent fly, the flashlight caught a pair of raccoons on the picnic table. One of them had his little hands around a bottle of Dos Equis and his furry little lips over the top of the empty long neck! Ha! No beer to wash down the bagels! I hoped he had cottonmouth from all of that bread! After an inspection of the cooler and a couple of laps around our site spent sniffing the ground, we didn't hear or see them again all night.
Day 2
In the morning we ate what we had left for breakfast, packed up camp and went out to explore Mosquito Lagoon some more. We found that morning in the estuary was very different from the evening. We watched as at least a half dozen osprey swirled in the sky, diving down to the top of the shallow water and snatching small fish for their breakfast. As one would dive, another would fly by with a fish clasped in their talons. We also spotted great egrets, several great blue heron, tri-colored heron and another type of small heron wading along fishing for breakfast too. Small terns hovered above the water and gracefully dove in, occasionally surfacing with a small fish in their beaks. As we cruised around we noticed that we could hear snapping and clicking sounds. A closer inspection lead us to one of many oyster beds. The oysters were clicking, popping and spitting water in little streams into the air.
We spent the rest of the morning cruising around and enjoying the beautiful day. We spotted only four or five kayakers in the lagoon with us. As we paddled back through Jones's canal and back into the Intracoastal Waterway, we stopped one last time at our campsite to do what we originally stopped to do the first time - pee. As we entered the waterway and headed back south, we stuck close to the left bank. Other than a few pelicans, the scenery was notably less remarkable than Mosquito Lagoon's. After our two mile or so paddle back to Riverbreeze Park (a.ka. Riverwood Park) we loaded our canoe back up and headed home.
In summary, CNS is a great place for canoeing or kayaking. Jone's Canal campsite is a nice, clean and attractive campsite that makes an easy overnight paddle or great first or last stops on a multi-day paddle, due to its proximity to a take-out point (Riverbreeze Park). See our review of Shipyard Island's Campsites for camping options in the northeastern part of Mosquito Lagoon CNS.
