Spirit of the Swamp Airboat Tours

I received this emailed photo earlier this month… we had this fun group of passengers take an airboat ride while they were here in Central Florida for the Daytona 500. 

Hello,

 We really enjoyed our tour on Monday the 16th. Thank you for making it fun and memorable! Sorry it took so long to get these to you. Hope all is well.

 Best, Amy Drinkwater

We had a great time (as always) and at the end of the ride we stopped to take a photo of them on the airboat – with their camera of course.  We’re not a tourist trap and we don’t try to sell you photos, we always use your camera.

Amy came up with the brilliant idea to place her camera on the air filter of the boat and set it to automatic so that we ALL could be in the picture, including Captain Harold and myself.  Now why didn’t we ever think of that?  Here’s the result!

We always look for alligators on our airboat rides – all sizes!  And our passengers want to know “just how big was that gator?”  Well… we count every inch – from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail.  First of all, we’re not crazy enough to jump into in the swamp with a measuring tape if that’s what you’re thinking!   To guess of the size of an alligator, we estimate the distance from his nose to his eyes in inches – say it’s about 7 inches, and then we presume the gator to be about 7 feet in length. 

An alligator will grow about a foot per year in size during its juvenile years… a 2 foot gator is about 2 years old.  Right now the baby alligators we’re seeing were born in the summer of 2008 and they’re about a foot in length.  A gator will reach its sexual maturity and be ready to breed at about 6 feet long – male gators usually grow faster and get larger than female gators. 

So come take an airboat tour with Spirit of the Swamp and see if you can guess how big the gators are!

Today we had a writer on the boat – Abby’s written a novel that is set in the swamp and she and her family took an airboat ride with us today so she could “research” and get the real deal feel of the beautiful swamp and all its creatures.  I know I’ll be sharing her photos with you soon. 

Abby and her family are from Alaska, and I believe there’s an alligator in her book named “Bessie”.  I’m sure we’ll be sharing more details about the novel as it gets closer to being published.   And by the way Abby’s newly married so congratulations to her and her new husband Mike!

We also had another birthday airboat ride this morning.  John and Laura are here from Kentucky and it was Laura’s birthday yesterday and the airboat tour was a surprise for her!  We had a great time on the water and in the swamp and John even promised to send Captain Harold some special Kentucky bourbon – thanks John.  Oh and I think we’ll also be seeing Laura’s parents real soon as they want to take an airboat ride as well.