Spirit of the Swamp Airboat Tours

Yesterday was another great day on the airboat – all of our passengers were having such a good time on their airboat ride!  And they were so much fun!  I got this email from Steve and some super photos of their airboat tour:

Hey guys … we had a great time today and wanted to share some images.

Good luck in the future and have a great week.  Steve

Here are Steve’s photos from our one hour airboat tour (remember to click on the photo to enlarge it!)

We love repeat business… it’s so wonderful to catch up with the passengers who’ve ridden our airboat before.   We’re looking forward to seeing John and Donna from Scotland again tomorrow…. they actually took two airboat tours with us when they were here on holiday last year!   

We also took a reservation from a family in the UK that was referred to us by their brother – they said all their brother has done is rave about his airboat ride on Spirit of the Swamp.  See how word gets around?  When you build a fantastic reputation, the passengers will return again and again! 

This is a question we’re asked a lot on our airboat tours – “what do gators eat?”  Well… they eat ANYTHING!  Seriously, they’re called opportunistic eaters, and they will, in fact, chow down on whatever happens to swim or move in front of them.

We have seen them with food in their mouths before… in fact it happened again yesterday (what a treat for our passengers!)  This gator had a fish in his mouth.  We’ve also seen a gator with a bird in its mouth.   Fish are the most common diet, easy prey for sure.  We respect this beautiful and powerful creature, so we would never feed a gator in the wild – it would lose its fear of humans and think of us as a food source!  In fact, you should know that it’s illegal in Florida to feed a wild alligator. 

After a rainy day on Monday, the rest of the week has brought us very little rains in the afternoon, and it’s been hot, hot, hot!  Because our airboat rides are in the Central Florida area, we’re obviously tuned into the typical summertime weather patterns – cool in the morning, heating up during the day and afternoon thunderstorms.   That’s exactly why we recommend starting your airboat tour in the morning.

A lot of our passenger’s think that that the gators will be laying on the banks during the summertime… actually they can’t.  Since they’re cold blooded, they’d heat up too quickly. 

But this week has been the exception – hardly any rains and very hot afternoons.  This means that the gators aren’t very active and tend to stay under water most of the time, where it’s cooler, this week.  So believe it or not, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the weather pattern returns back to normal soon, so we get those cooling afternoon rains, which in turn, cool the water and make the gators swim around more actively!