King’s Landing – Rock Springs Run

King’s Landing rents canoes and kayaks for an eight mile ride down Rock Springs Run. Back in February and March, my buddy and I went there four times to rent a canoe and paddle down the river. The first time we went was a lot of trial-and-error. All four times, I sat at the front of the boat while my friend sat in the back. It took us most of the first trip to get our steering down to a science.

A couple weeks later we gave it another try and had much better results. We even decided to stop at a campsite to scope it out for future reference. There are three campsites along the run – Big Buck Campsite which is a nice larger camp area with a water spigot, Indian Mound Campsite which is up a steep incline and a nice smaller camping area, and finally Otter Campground which is as big as Indian Mound. We stopped at Big Buck and thought it was a nice campground, then stopped at Indian Mound and found it more to our liking as it was more out of the way. We did not stop at Otter Campground on this trip since there were already campers there.

On our third trip we stopped again at Indian Mound and made our first stop to Otter Campground, which we didn’t like as much. We had decided our fourth trip would include camping and would try and obtain Indian Mound. Indian Mound was not available however, so we ended up getting Otter Campground for our fourth trip.

We left work early on a Friday and made it to King’s Landing around four. We had about three hours of solid sunlight and we predicted it would take about two and a half hours to make it to camp, so we hauled ass down the river. We made it in time and I set up the tents quickly before getting a fire going in the damp evening air. There wasn’t much dry wood other than what we brought with us, but there was a large piece of wood, damp but useable. I used some tinder to get the dry wood burning and used that to dry out and burn the larger piece.

During the night the critters came out and decided to munch on our food, pulling it from its bags and spreading it around camp. In the morning, awakened with a hangover, I got up and tried to keep the fire going with pine needles in the cold late-winter air, but efforts became pointless as it wouldn’t sustain enough to burn any of the wood dampened during the stormy night.

We hiked a bit of the trails in the area before hopping in the canoe and heading back down the river. Unlike the previous couple times, we did not park one of our cars at the end of the run, so we had a lot of time to kill. We took the canoe all the way into the Wekiva Springs and floated around for a bit before heading the other way past the end of the run. As a storm brewed on the horizon, we headed back and ended our trip. We had to wait to get a ride back to King’s Landing, but eventually we did and ended our adventure.