What a beautiful traveling day! It started out on the cold side with our foul weather jackets on, and we ended up in t-shirts. What beautiful scenery along the cut here. There's a variety of trees, bushes and marsh grass but the most distinctive thing that I couldn't seem to keep my camera off of was the bald cypress and dead stumps in the water. The light color of the wood just stood out from the dark green evergreen bushes and yellow/greens of the grass. Throw in the dark brown/red water that they stand in, and Patti was snapping pictures left and right. Rob asked me to send pictures but lordy I wouldn't know where to start...

Speaking of the water here - The dark coffee color comes from tannin. It's released from the roots and decaying leaves of the juniper and bald cypress trees along the water and gives all the boats a mustache on their bow that come through the ICW. While the water looks dirty, it's not. Per the Doyle's in "Managing the Waterway" the old ships used to seek out water with tannin as it wouldn't spoil as easily. It increased the acidity of the water they stored in their scuttlebutts (wood barrels) so it wouldn't become buggy as quickly as water without it. I found that fact interesting and somehow comforting. Before reading about the color, it felt like we were traveling through dark muddy water...

The rivers, sounds, oxbows and cuts all seem to have their own personalities/ecosystems. The bald cypresses along here intrigue me. Their gnarled branches and roots look so old and fragile but the wood is a type of redwood that is resistant to rot. It's seldom harvested now because it's so slow to grow, but was liberally harvested in the past for use in hulls, coffins and as fence posts. These and other pines and conifers are good judges as to the amount of salt present in the water in the areas that we pass through. They're not salt tolerant so the more skeletons of cypress that we see, the saltier the water is. It's interesting to note how in some areas, you'll see the dead trees, then grasses teeming along the shore with the pines standing way further back or further uphill. As I recall, this area also has floating bogs (per my MS State fieldtrip to the Carolinas). I wish I'd have brought my field notes from 2 years ago now (I totally forgot them). I'll have to go by memory but it's good to see that it's still in my thoughts too.