Surrounded by manatees! Kayaking in the Indian River

Well we're back for round two on our bioluminescent sunset tour so we're excited to get on the water and it's just the two of us. It'll be a nice private romantic night on the Indian River so much. Welcome to Wildflowers Adventures. And we're off with Gabe our tour guide. Ready? No, we have a nice calm day. Got it. It's hard to tell but this is only about, I don't know, maybe two, three feet deep or so. Blue heron. Oh they're good. They have a stink like almost like black ring around the top of their head. I don't know if y'all can see it. Yeah. There's a lot of manatee in this area. It's like the cool spot to be for manatee. We had them to where they come up to my boat and I literally had one stick their flipper. Wow. Y'all want to kind of paddle off to the side or my left side. Oh there he is. Oh he's right under the boat. Just do real nice shallow paddle movements so you don't bump your head. Giant. They are giant. I love y'all's boat. They look cool. There's one right there. Yeah they're everywhere. Wow I've never seen them that close other than on this when I was on the shore. Checking us out. Hey buddy. That's a weird video for me. That's pretty cool. Wow we got really lucky today. No where'd he go? I thought he was coming this way. Oh on the other side. They're all around. I can't turn that fast right. I don't know. Does that mean we were or were not invited to the party? They would have knocked us out of our boats by now if they didn't like us. Yeah they're massive. This is what like I don't know five feet from our boats. The closest living uh mammal or closest living animal to related to these manatees is actually an elephant. Oh very cool. You know it's you know a lot of people are like oh it's a sea cow but you can say sea elephant now. A sea elephant yeah. You can tell they have kind of like the same textured skin. Yeah and a lot of times like you know they're super super still kind of phase moving through the water. That's what I've always seen them like. I've never seen them this active and but when they uh when they want to they can actually go from about zero to 25 miles miles Oh wow. Two or three sweeps of the tail. Wow they are gentle giants. Yeah amazing. Surface like right up on top and it just just makes it real smooth distilled on the top of the water. Yeah you can see it. I know she's like sniffing the boat. They're literally all around us in every direction. Oops sorry. That was cool. That was a really neat experience. A lot of Bob's adventures. He's been rowing the whole time. See that's why I love having you around and for lots of other reasons. I'm perfectly safe and I'm just chilling. Now I feel bad for this guy. It was way out here by himself. Hi Milky. Cove area that we just went through and I only had like three people on my tour so I was just kind of going ahead scouting out the area and I saw this it was just a little thing sticking out of the water. I didn't know what it was because I had it moving like 10 minutes and one of my flashlights like right here and it was a pot of four manatees and they all swooped and I they lifted my boat out of the water and I got absolutely soaked. So you didn't get in the water but they just they soaked you pretty well. It was probably kind of scary though. Probably got a few like a second air. Yeah. That's pretty cool. It hasn't happened to me but one of my buddies who's also a guide had a two or three bull sharks knock her off her boat. Oh true. Like actually came up to her boat, hit her out of her boat, she fell in the water. No way. Okay well right now we rebuke that in the name of Jesus. We're all gonna be safe. No bull sharks are gonna bully us today. Oh my goodness that would be terrifying. So many mullet that are jumping. Apparently mullet jumped out of the water to avoid predators. So something's trying to have their dinner. Oh there's some more manatees. Hey little guy. Oh yeah so that one we have nicknamed Tony the tiger. I don't know if y'all see the white scar on the back. Oh poor buddy. Tony the tiger. Tony the tiger. I mean it has like claw marks that's what we mean. Yeah but that that manatee actually has a baby manatee. I don't know where where the baby is right now. I think the baby's coming up on like a year and a half. So do they stay with the family? Yeah so for about two to two and a half years they'll stay with the mother. Oh and how long do they live? Off the top of my head I can't say. I honestly don't know either. I believe they're probably closer to 15 years. Also gators on the other hand will live to about 40 years. Yeah I'd like to see them from a far distance. I had sent up a certain like select location across this whole refuge. Now you can find through this refuge about 150,000 acres. The whole Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. So they set up different locations where they were pretty much feeding like lettuce scraps and stuff. Some ospreys here. The nest is up here. Yeah I've seen them. That is so bright. Paddling out to Bird Island. Might be able to see some pink flamingos. Oh right it was the osprey. Osprey nest. In the distance is NASA's AAB or Vehicle Assembly Building. Right I know. The sun is very bright. This is Bird Island. It's a federally protected bird sanctuary. Area closed. Just waiting on the sunset. Stretching my legs a little bit. So as the sun is setting the waves are picking up a little bit more so we're gonna head back to closer to the original island and maybe see some bioluminescence. Waiting for it to get a little darker so hopefully we'll be able to see more bioluminescence. Although I don't think it's going to come out very well on camera. I'll do my best to capture it for you guys. See if you can see it. Yeah you can't see it at all in the video. Maybe when I go back and look at it. Maybe that might, that might have shown up. A bunch of these little microorganisms. These phytoplankton called dinoflagellates. Now these dinoflagellates they are not dinosaur farts. They are a type of similar to an algae. Like I said phytoplankton. That pretty much make up the majority of the water. And then like I said when they come into contact with anything like my hand, a paddle, a fish, the boat, they give off this light in a chemical reaction once a night. So what's really cool about them is they during the day they'll charge up using photosynthesis from the sun and then at night they will again when when they come into contact with anything they'll give off a chemical reaction using the chemical called luciferin and the enzyme called luciferase. As the stars continued to shine brightly upon us we close out our evening with deep gratitude for this amazing and beautiful experience. Thank you all for watching and as always love and light to you all.