Fox Lake Expedition

[yakmaster]

Folks, it's a long one so pour yourself a cup of coffee or your adult beverage of choice & sit down & enjoy (or doze off as the case may be).

 

Kim, I'm fresh off the water, So I don't want to hear that the locals are homecooking and hoarding the good spots. Gary, don't worry, no fish were found in the new places discussed below!

 

So on with the story...

 

Three groups converged on Bear Lake and points beyond today.

 

One Group starting from little coot and going to the cape.

One Group starting from little coot and going to the interior. 

One Group starting from Bear Lake trailhead and going to the interior. 

 

This is the story of the last two groups, Terry's misfits (we never seem to fit in the spaces we try to get through). We didn't go as far as the other group, but we went MUCH deeper.

 

From the pictures coming from the Cape ladies, they look cleaner & fresher than Terry's misfits do.

After an early brunch around 11, the cape folks bid us farewell and continued west. We decided to try and find a good route into Fox lakes and in a perfect world, find a route from there to south Joe (ain't looking good, but beyond the scope of this expedition).

 

All the maps out there show one or two creeks, depending on the map, from just east of the western opening of the Homestead Canal, heading north into the lake, looks easy right?

http://www.mytopo.com/maps/?lat=25.1794&lon=-81.00309&z=15 Check it out for yourself.

 

Well, first we tried to go east on the Homestead. Bad Idea. Very Bad Idea. It cost me a rudder and a paddle, along with a swim in nasty bottomless muck (and apparently my spot signal). We got to within 500' of where the creeks and/or canals are supposed to be and we couldn't go any further east. When I say we couldn't go any further, I don't mean it got tight, I mean it was solid blocked. We had limboed under, scooted between and dragged over dozens of deadfalls up to that point, but what was in front of us was NASTY. It was a ongoing carpet/wall of downed trees. It was impenetrable.

 

Tom Rahill, if  you are out there, you are a special man. That place (& the places you tend to work) is nasty and twisted. You can clear this area if you want, but this trip (and the affiliated cruise to the cape) shows that alternatives (that look and smell better than the canal) are quite usable to get to the cape or the Foxes.

 

Once we gave up on and escaped the tunnel of doom, we headed north into the pond west of east fox.

Though no clear path showed on GE, we decided to probe & see. we had some candidate points that looked interesting from the air, but didn't pan out on the ground. So we set to wandering and found Wandering Creek, so named because it was found by wandering and because it wanders about so much that several times, we almost abandoned it.

 

Here's the image, the route is not as clean as desired:

 

Here's a zoomed in version:

In the interest of full transparency, I have attached the actual track, for those who like to play with these things (in both Garmin and KMZ formats).

 

After we found our way in (by the way, spectacular creek, picture a cathedral like canopy like the one in Halfway Creek, but with a twisty creek less than 3' wide and lined with barnacles!), I and others took a break (hence, the end of the track) but several others patrolled east fox to answer two questions.

 

1. are there really creeks on the south side going over to Homestead canal? No such passage was found. It may have been there once, but it ain't there no more.

 

2. How do you get from East Fox to Middle Fox? They tell me the route is easy, beautiful and wide open and that Middle Fox is even prettier. I will leave that exploration for another day, along with finding a route from Middle Fox to West Fox, and from there, dare we hope to the pond south of the South Joe Cove. Now that would be an incredible loop route! Not only would it open South Joe to folks that want to avoid Whitewater Bay, But you could go from the east end of Whitewater to the Cape on the inside.

 

To be honest, it doesn't look good from the topos & Google Earth, but then again, before we paddled it, the Homestead canal looked promising and the lake we used didn't!

 

On the way back, tattered, torn (and rudderless), Bear lake seemed much longer than it had in the morning and the barnacle encrusted logs west of bear lake seemed sharper and the mudflats seemed stickier, but shortly after dark all were back on the road with boats loaded and ready to go home to get ready for the next one.

 

And looking forward to hearing of the Excellent Cape Adventure,  along with Connie & Flex's pix (and yours too, Vivian & Jay)

BTW Vivian. I'm blaming you for the jinx on my rudder, you know why, I shouldn't comment on a lady's vessel of choice!

[vivian]

But you did not want to sleep in 80 degree heat. We actually had such a nice sea breeze it made everyone run grab their jackets so they could sit by the roaring fire and relax. Yes, you should've come along with us :-). Sorry about the rudder failure too many mangrove fingers reaching out to grab us.

[Terry]

I don't understand, why would anyone want to be sitting on a beach at a campfire when you

could be doing this:

[Terry]

The water station we came across at 10.508' N and 0.338' W in Homestead Canal

is not in the USGS inventory.    Judging by the station itself and the equipment on

the other side of the spoil it appears to be in use.

Odd, this is the only station that I have found in the backcountry and not found 

in the inventory.

While you're probing around in the USGS inventory and GE, take a look at 251115081075800 in

Raulersons Brothers Canal.   Zoom in on GE and look at the hiking trail that leads to it from

the nearest water.  That's all motorboat-able water.

[vivian]

I saw the same thing when I was looking around GE to see where the creeks feeding the prairie where located. I'll bet that is one popular fishing area.

[yakmaster]

What're they walking to/from?

Interesting that there are no "official" stations in the prairie or any of what we did?

How many un-id'd ones do you think are out there? With all the $$$ they've spent on the plugs, to avoid saltwater intrusion, you'd think someone would be measuring waterlevels & salinity.

[vivian]

It looks like they are walking to the station. That creek plus the ones we used to paddle out to the EC canal are getting wider and saltwater will and has been intruding into the praire. The only way to prevent that is by closing the EC Canal and that will not happen. IMHO in a few years those creeks will get wider and deeper as water carves them open. The unnatural flow and current through that canal is pretty strong.