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.

Wekiva Springs State Park and GoPro Video

Over the weekend one of the stops I made was to Wekiva Springs State Park. I had been into the park on multiple occasions while canoeing down Rock Springs Run, but this was my first time entering the park via car. My experiences in the park from canoeing centered around the campsites – stopping at Otter Campground one time for the night and hiking the trails there for a bit, meeting up with the actual hiking trail of the park. But that was back in March when it was much cooler and had less bugs – though the critters did come out and steal most of my food.

This time I was interested in visiting the park to check out the swimming hole to determine if it would be a suitable location for a mid-week swim on my lunch hour. Wekiva Springs is the closest State Park to where I work – a twenty minute drive – so it was the best option for swimming since my gym doesn’t have a pool. That morning I had ran ten miles for my marathon training, so I was looking forward to resting in the cool water of the spring, but first we ran into a presentation that was about to begin – the topic being Controlled Burns.

I figured I could spare a half hour or so for a presentation, especially since it seemed no one else was going to come by to watch it. We were shown maps of the park, pictures pre and post burn, and various mathematical charts for predicting things like burn rate. We were given a demonstration on the water hose on the back of their truck, followed by an administration of flame to the ground, but when he went to put out the flame with the hose, the truck turned off; instead he just stomped out the tiny flame. It was all very anticlimactic.

After an hour of presentation, I made my way to the swimming hole to get some pictures, then back to the car to lock up my valuables, since I’d already had my sunglasses stolen at Blue Springs State Park recently. I made it back to the spring and quickly got in and began swimming around. I made my way over to the boil where I spent a good half hour diving down into the crevasse and swimming back out. There was a large rock at the bottom that I made a few efforts of carrying up to the surface, but midway up I lost all momentum and couldn’t carry my weight and the rock’s with just my feet, so I dropped it down each time – the final time causing it to jam itself in a crack. It was a fun game while it lasted.

After finishing my freediving for the day, I got in my swimming for my Triathlon training, getting in a ten minute freestyle swim that took two laps of the spring, almost 400 meters – my distance needed to be covered in the Triathlon. I did a little bit more swimming and called it a day.

I returned on Wednesday as a mid-week cross-training exercise. I had been biking on Wednesdays, but my knee has been getting increasingly worse, so the low-impact activity of swimming was a good change. This time I brought my GoPro with me, though I forgot my goggles, so I did some more freediving to get video to piece together. I finally learned to keep my fingers out of the shots and I feel I got some pretty good material. I also tried more swimming, but without goggles, I couldn’t stay streamlined and couldn’t keep myself going for more than five minutes.

Over the weekend, I also visited the New Smyrna Beach side of Canaveral National Seashore, but the water was way too murky to get video – I couldn’t even read my watch pressed up against my goggles. I also went to Blue Springs again and did some freediving in the boil there, but didn’t bring my GoPro. It’s a lot harder swimming with a GoPro in my hand than without, especially when trying to keep it as steady as possible and not have my body constantly in the shot. So check out my Wekiva Springs video below and check back often for more fun stuff! I post daily on various topics and I have a lot of material left!

I’ve now been to eight of the ten best springs in Central Florida. How many have you been to? Have you been to Wekiva Springs? Where does it rank on your list? What’s your favorite Central Florida spring? Or favorite spring anywhere?