We anchored overnight at the Little Shark River on the West coast of the Everglades. It’s an amazing jungle of towering 60 ft. red mangrove trees taking up every square foot of water less than 4 ft. deep. This created thousands of “islands” of mangroves where there is no land, since the tree roots grow in shallow water. The deeper tide channels and river estuaries create a huge maze, almost an Alice in Wonderland kind of maze, that goes and goes seemingly forever. It feels like being in the Amazon jungle. The Shark river is water that flows out of the Everglades, going west into the Gulf of Mexico instead of south into the Atlantic Ocean. The river is about 50 miles wide and 3 ft. deep, except for the channels between the islands, which are 4 to 10 ft. deep. The picture below shows the mangrove "shores with no land" along the river channels. Daisy's life jacket is very handy because it has a handle on it to pick her up to get her in the dighy or just hold her from jumping out.

We planned on anchoring there knowing that we probably couldn’t take Daisy for a walk on any land, so we ran the dinghy 2 miles to a campground indicated on the charts, figuring that there must be ground there and a place to land a small boat. After 2 miles through many twists and turns, we got to the campsite only to find that it was two large wood platforms on stilts in the mangrove jungle, connected by another platform that had a port-a-pottie on it. The platforms were already covered with tents from local campers so we couldn’t even get out to see if Daisy would go on the wood platform. She just had to wait until the next day when we got into Marathon Key. She did fine, but Kathy was feeling really sorry for Daisy having to wait so long. I think it bothered Kathy more than it did Daisy. Kathy is always projecting her own feelings into the dog, like “she just loves this soft cheese, you know” when Daisy can’t tell us if she does or not. Kathy was imagining having to wait a whole day.

We got up early and left Little Shark River because we wanted to get to Marathon and the waves forecast was for waves of 2 ft. or less, and waves are frequently lower in the early morning hours. That turned out to be the case and we had an uneventful crossing.