Sabbatical Soundings 7 - a flying start and gentle giants

Before leaving Florida, we stopped for a few hours in St Petersburg on Tampa Bay and made an unexpected discovery. It turns out that this was the site of the world's first commercial flight - a "flying boat" piloted by the world's first commercial airline pilot, Tony Jannus.

There's more about him on this website, but it was fun to watch the small planes take off and land and do circuits at the small airport and flying school on the bay. We also couldn't resist a photo of Andrew with his "original ancestor" in the world of aviation! 

After St Petersburg we made our way to Crystal River, where we stayed in a gorgeous hotel near the shorefront. 

It's a small town  - and we saw a lot of those in our travels - they truly are a world away from the big cities of our last US trip. But it's a small town with a big claim as the manatee capital of the world. Seeing a manatee was another thing I wanted to do on our travels and we went out on a boat (again!) one sunny afternoon and saw several of these gentle giants. The Kings Bay in Crystal River is fed by about 50 warm springs and so the water has a relatively consistent temperature of around 20 degrees Celsius. This means that in the winter, hundreds of endangered manatees who are warm-blooded mammals make the Bay their home and the environment is actively managed for their protection.

This is a juvenile manatee

It's also the only place in the US where swimming or boating near them is permitted. They're not easy to photograph but I did manage to get a couple of shots!

Crystal River looks idyllic with lovely waterfront homes and many opportunities for fishing, kayaking and enjoying the environment. But our boat guide also told the story of last summer's hurricane in August 2023 (news footage here showing the storm surge) which was swiftly followed by a tornado in October 2023  - news coverage here . We commented on the renovation work going on in our hotel when we arrived - and now we understood the reason why. This community has a deep understanding of both the beauty and the destructive power of nature. When I asked the hotel staff about the impact of the storms they found it hard to talk about this double blow in such quick succession. The storm surge from Hurricane Idylia took the water as high as the bottom of the letters on the front of Pete's Pier.