Man o’ Manatees

Swimming with manatees in Florida!

January is manatee mania month in Florida. There is no better time of year to see – and swim with (yes!) – these gentle giants in The Sunshine State. Floridians go all out to show off the endangered sea cows, including throwing a festival or two. Did someone say festival? No way we would miss that!

Swimming with manatees in Florida!

In winter the Florida subspecies of the West Indian Manatee (Trichechus manatus) can be found on both the Gulf and Atlantic sides of the state seeking warm waters. Since we had seen them on the Atlantic side a couple of years ago, and especially since we learned that it was the only place where we could actually get in the water and swim with manatees, we headed to the town of Crystal River on the Gulf Coast.

Swimming with manatees in Florida!

The area around Crystal River has about fifty mammoth fresh water springs that feed Kings Bay with perfect seventy-two-degree water year round. The manatees come to the springs to mate, feed, or just rest and get away from the colder seas. In fact, they like the water in the bay so much that they have been known to stay even through the summer.

We made an afternoon out of exploring our options as to which of the many “Swim With Manatees” boat tours to use by bicycling around the quaint little bay side village of Crystal River.

Along the way we spotted several sea cows feeding along the seawall in the bay. Let the mania begin.

After talking to a few of the tour operators, and reading up on the excursions while stopping off for a little waterfront refreshment, we were convinced that our ultimate meeting-the-manatees experience awaited us not in Crystal River, but ten miles south at Homosassa Springs.

So the next day we drove on down to board our boat ready to say howdy to some sea cows face-to-face.

Monkey island of The Homosassa Riverside Resort, FloridaAnother of the massive springs common to the Florida Aquifer feeds the Homosassa River, and manatees are known to swim several miles up the stream to congregate near the source. We chose this tour because it is usually less crowded, the water is often clearer, and it had the added bonus of getting to see some monkeys.

Yup, monkeys, as in more fun than a barrel of. Just after leaving the dock our boat passed by the famous monkey island of The Homosassa Riverside Resort.

The five resident spider monkeys all gave us a good show, climbing trees and swinging from ropes while we cruised by. Our captain, Laura, explained how the little primates got there.

Monkey island of The Homosassa Riverside Resort, Florida

Dr. John Hamlet was convinced to move to Florida by the resort’s colorful owner G. A. “Furgy” Furgason. It seems the good doctor had been using monkeys to study the polio vaccine and Furgy, always the promoter, had the idea that they might make a good tourist attraction.

After dredging in the marina created a pile of rocks just offshore from his businesses, Furgy had his monkey island.

Another fifteen minutes or so up the river and we were wetsuited up and ready to go. But first the rules. Manatees are protected by several state and federal laws, so it is strictly forbidden to harass them in any way.

No chasing, poking, scaring, riding, or in any way going cowboy with the sea cows is allowed. It is not a roundup, pardner.

Veronica all snorkeled up and ready to go!

Captain Laura explained that it was best to try to stay still and let them come to you. And they did. A lot.

They are huge, adults often reach over one thousand pounds and babies nearly half that, and they swam right up to us. Several times we had no idea one was around until it was right next to us. They seemed to come out of nowhere.

Swimming with manatees in Florida!

Manatees are slow moving, very gentle, and actually seem to enjoy interacting with humans, so we mostly floated silently and let them move around us.

We even got to touch a couple of them, which is allowed as long as it is done softly and with an open hand. Their skin is a little bristly, with short, coarse hairs, and often covered with a layer of algae.

They nearly all have tell-tale parallel lines across their backs from boat’s propellers. In fact they have no natural predators, humans are really their only threat, mainly from impact with boats, but also loss of habitat and pollution.Sadly, as we had noticed in our land-based manatee viewings, almost every one of these congenial creatures bears scars from collisions with watercraft.

Scars on the back of a manatee from boat propeller

The good news is that a great deal of effort is being made to protect them and their numbers seem to have stabilized, with at least five thousand spending the past few winters in Florida.

One of the groups working to preserve the manatee population is Friends of Blue Springs State Park. For thirty years they have been raising funds and awareness with The Orange City / Blue Springs Manatee Festival.

Our timing was perfect, the festival was winding up the next day. So we drove across the peninsula to Orange City to get our fest on and see some more sea cows.

Food truck at Manatee Festival

Disc-Connected K-9 Frisbee Dog

The in-town portion of the festival is a really fun fair, with food, music, booths and the like, but the main attraction was not manatees – it was dogs.

The Disc-Connected K-9 show wowed the crowd with the amazing frisbee catching antics of a group of well trained border collies. We even got to watch a world champion do his high flying disc catching thing.

Disc-Connected K-9 Frisbee Dog

But the festival really is all about raising money to help the community and the state park, so busses were provided to shuttle folks from town out to the park.

Save the Manatee Club at the Manatee FestivalWe climbed aboard our standing-room-only coach for the short ride while reading up on the park from a brochure.

Blue Springs State Park, Florida

Blue Spring is another first magnitude spring, pouring forth over one hundred million gallons of water a day, and like the springs around Crystal River, the water stays a constant seventy-two degrees year round.

So manatees love it, and many will swim miles up the St. Johns River to get to it.

Click here for more pics of beautiful Blue Springs State Park

Blue Springs State Park, Florida

Exiting the bus, we took a boardwalk path up to the source of the spring and got exceptional views of all sorts of wildlife along the way.

Turtles, alligators, and any number of birds and fish, but the stars of the show were being quite shy. The half dozen or so manatees we saw were all resting on the other side of the river from the path, so we didn’t get a very good view.

Manatees at Blue Springs State Park, Florida
Click here for more pics of beautiful Blue Springs State Park

But that was fine with us, we really didn’t want to get greedy. We had already experienced about the best manatee encounter anyone could ever hope for.

David & Veronica, GypsyNester.com

Can’t get enough manatee action? Click here to see our sightings on Florida’s east coast! Be sure to watch our video on How to Spot a Manatee:


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20 thoughts on “Man o’ Manatees”

  1. Blue Springs is my most favorite place to visit in Florida. I’M A HUGE manatee fan, so i loved everything about your article. I haven’t swam with them yet, but i want to even more now! Thanks for the inspiration and for educating people about the beauty of manatees!

    1. You will love swimming with them. There are several operators in the Crystal Springs area that take groups out. Have fun and let us know how it goes.

  2. My dad lives half of the year in Florida, and he frequently canoes the Weeki Watchee River, and there are a ton of manatees in there and the water is crystal clear. Definitely want to head down there and check it out.

  3. I would LOVE to swim with manatees… it is on my bucket list You can see them around Austalia as well (I havn;t been so lucky though), but you are not allowed to swim with them here

    1. Wow! That would have made for some interesting video. Looks like it got closed down because people don’t like seeing where their food really comes from. How do they think the feathers get off of their KFC?

  4. For nearly 18 years I used to live just a couple hours from there. All of my family lives just down the road an hour away, but I never swam with the manatees. (I did swim with the sting rays in the Caymans, however. Shows you how when you live someplace you hardly ever do the touristy stuff. I grew up in New York and didn’t visit the Statue of Liberty until I’d been living in Florida for about 6 years and took a trip to New York!)

    As always, I love reading your posts. I think you’re living every nester’s dream 🙂

  5. Brings back a lot of great memories. I live about an hour from here and spent many weekends in the summer as a kid at Crystal River and Homosassa. In fact, I ate at the restaurant next to Monkey Island just a few weeks ago!

  6. Nice post. We saw manatees in the Miami River right off Brickell Avenue in downtown Miami last year, next to the Hyatt Regency and in shallow Biscayne Bay. We also saw them on the bay side of Key Largo. I am ashamed to admit that I would probably be screaming like a banshee woman if one came up to me. They are huge.

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