Surfing The Channel

If you’ve come to Miami, Florida, it’s a fair bet that you’re interested in the beaches and water.  While dry land offers a great many activities, including some great food and great museums, which you may find at the La Camaronera Fish Market, the Miami Science Museum, or the Vizcaya Museum, the options at sea are just as wide.  You’ll want to take a room for a week and really investigate the true locals of Miami, the West Indian Manatee.

To meet these locals in the water, you’ll first want to go to the shore, the harbors and canals.  There you may find wild manatees.  The Florida manatee, which happens to be the state’s official marine mammal, is actually related to the elephant.  Similar to elephants they have a kind of grayish brown, wrinkled skin.  Their flippers help them maneuver through shallow water, while their flat tails allow them to move quickly.  They may look like they have small eyes and no outer ears, but these aquatic creatures can see and hear perfectly well.   You’ll find they’re quite large, ten to twelve feet in length, and heavy, about one thousand five hundred to one thousand eight hundred pounds, and may live as long as fifty to sixty years in the sea.  Fortunately, they’re herbivores, dining on freshwater and marine plants.   If you want to see a manatee, Florida is the best possible place in the world, because the biggest population of the animals are found here.  There’s over three thousand of them.  They don’t travel far, perhaps migrating up to the Carolinas or over to Louisiana.  There are few unusual occurrences of a manatee swimming into the Mississippi River or traveling as far as New York, but that’s rare.  Generally, they prefer warmer waters, such as bays and shallow rivers.  They don’t like to go below 68 degrees, and who can blame them for that?

Some of the best places to find manatees is in Coral Gables.  Try the intersection of Douglas Road, Sunset, and Old Cutler.   You can also find them at Black Point Marina, the Dante Fascell Visitor Center, and Oleta Park.  If you have no luck at any of these sites, it’s always possible to see manatees at the Miami Seaquarium, where you will always find them swimming in the Celebrity Pool, which allows you to witness their activities above and below the waters.

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