I was born loving water. Looking back over more than eight decades I can honestly say the things I best remember are in one way or another connected to the wet stuff upon which all life depends. I’m sure in that sense I am certainly not unique.

Our family moved from Missouri to Florida in 1930. St. Petersburg in those days was the most populous, dynamic, tourist destination of any on the Florida west coast. Its population then numbered only in the thousands, and in those no air conditioning years, its summer to winter residence was a doubling statistic. Nine years old coming from the relatively muddy creeks I’d known to the crystal waters of Tampa Bay was really earthshaking for a small boy.

Today the bay waters are opaque and environmentally dead compared to then. To describe the unbelievable differences in life forms from then to now is almost impossible. In mind’s eye I can see the grass flats though freshly washed windowpane water beneath a flat-bottomed cypress wood skiff, from which hordes of fish fled the noise of my father’s cranky outboard. Rafts of aquatic birds, all kinds; gulls, pelicans, the occasional man-of-war’s, and massive flocks of ducks that came and went like the myriad human snowbirds; wheeled and darted everywhere in profusion.

A couple of years later when we moved to the town that named the bay, my luck continued as our home always sat close to the magnificent Hillsborough River that flowed through Tampa. Then it was a powerful stream whose currents curling through many an angled bend would form boils bulging inches high where it struck bank or bottom resistance.

One famous landmark was called Hanna’s Whirl just a bit upstream from our first house that practically marked the end of civilization in those post-depression years. A favorite part of any boat trip we neighborhood boys made, and we lived on the river only going home when forced by hunger or rare parental demands, was to drift through the Whirl just to feel its mighty lift. Even the innumerable alligators seemed to shun that part of the river, preferring to sun along more placid stretches. On lazy summer days we’d stretch out on the water oak limbs that overhung the stream, especially along Seventeen Runs, just to watch the waving eelgrass and the marine life swimming there.

Many times in those years we’d row our boats eight miles or so downstream through Tampa’s heart to camp at Hooker’s Point, or some of the saltwater outfall islets that later fell victim to subdivision developer dredges. On those trips we’d take freshwater, bread or corn meal, maybe a can or two if scrounged outside some mother’s depression trained kitchen watch. Most of our meals came from a wealth that could be found stranded in the low tide pools we knew well.

In those days the river water was so clear you could see bottom except in the deepest areas, and easily spot the massive cypress logs that littered the bottom from its 1800s lumbering industry heydays. In fact our ruffian group raised some of these logs to build a fire circle on the riverbank where we gathered. I especially remember one period watching an exceptionally large "stump-knocker" bream who had swept out a nest under one such log, as it fought day and night protecting the eggs deposited therein from smaller predators. Watched until the natural miracle was finished, before we floated that log too for our outdoor miracle place.

A few years ago, I went back to see the Hillsborough where I had known it. There was no flow; a dam upstream had penned it off for City of Tampa’s water supply. A giant flood control canal had been dug also by the Corps of Engineers that was supposed to bypass Tampa from another high water occurrence like 1960. Instead, for the most part, its length was now used to also store water for ever greedier bay developments.

You couldn’t see your hand under six inches of the water. Looking at the trash floating the surface and lining the shore, no intelligent person would put their hand in the water! I won’t go back again.

Things I’ve seen on and in Florida water no one will ever see again.

I’ve seen mullet circling in a Homosassa River dead end location, so thick they weren’t fish, just the entire bottom moving, acres in expanse.

I’ve seen schooling bass chasing minnows through the run entering the north end of Davis Lake, so thick it looked like white water on the upper Suwannee River.

I saw the Miami River; from saltwater to the Everglades, when it was so clear it was like floating on air. And around every bend, alligators dove off banks so thick our small group of just-returned vets from WW II lost count around 2,024. The best memory now can recall.

Before the drag netters began murdering schools of roe filled females moving to spawn in freshwater rivers emptying into Tampa Bay, I’ve many times seen robalo (snook, locally) so thick they rivaled the Homosassa mullet above.

I’ve seen tarpon rolling under Gandy Bridge on a hot summer’s day, as far as you could see standing in the skiff, just a moving sea of silver.

Sitting on the after deck of a houseboat, a craft the now defunct Chassahowitzka Inn once rented to anglers on that river, looking west at sunset I saw ducks come upriver so thick they brought the dark way early, with a roar like jets taking off.

Where I now live, in the late fifties, I used to stand on the bank and pick out the duck, know his kind that we’d have for supper, so I could shoot knowing he’d fall onshore. Always did hate wet feet. I’ve been a very lucky man, also, as I saw much more!