I saw one at the Black Hammock that was near 20 foot long that those crazy good ole boys caught the night before. I used to live on a small lake and once in a while a 6 footer would visit from a swampy area across the road. Amazing it made it across a four lane divided highway so many times. It would come visit in Spring right after the Mallard duck had it’s babies. You’d see 6 ducklings following mama one day and the next day it would be 5, day after that 4 etc. They finally caught it heading back over to it’s swamp one time and that was that. Took several years though.
My neighbor there took me to Lake Jessup to learn how to sail in some tiny sailboat. Once we were out in the middle and I had taken over, he informed me about Lake Jessup being the most highly gator infested lake in the state. No pressure though. LOL
Pollard,
Your post brings back memories. In 1992-1993 I was a dump truck owner/operator working on the Eastern Beltway from the south end of the Lake Jessup bridge to Red Bug Road. At the end of the day we would park our big trucks at the blast freezer that was near the highway on Black Hammock Road.
Interesting that the bridge was completed months before we started the road construction. It was a mess! All the muck and mud had to be dug out and replaced with clean fill dirt for the road bed. It was impossible for a loaded dump truck to turn around, near the bridge, because of the soft soil so we had to turn around near the overpass and back down about a quarter mile to the dump location.
WE were driving across the bridge long before the road was completed. I noted then that I never wanted to get out on that lake because of all the gators I saw while driving across the bridge.
About that same timeframe, a young girl became lost in the swamp between the Ovido road and the lake. Everyone thought she would be taken by the gators but she was found a couple of days later relatively unharmed. Don’t know how she managed that.
Just some thoughts about gators and Lake Jessup. If you love your Dogs, don’t let them get near any lake, pond, stream or drainage/retention pond, even in a subdivision, because there will probably be a gator in there that will take your dearly loved K-9 companion.
A few years ago a young female student at U.F. took her beautiful Irish Setter to play at a soccer field. the field bordered on a swampy area and when the dog got near that area a gator took the dog, right there in view of the girl. Needless to say she was devastated.
Topsail,