A new aspect we will be adding to our site starting today, are specific stories detailing bizzarre and interesting occurances as we travel around the state during our endless pursuit of big-game and our will to spread the word of conservation to all sportsman across the world. And, for our first "happening", do we have a barn-burner for you!
The right hand man for Team Rebel's operation (Chris Nicklin) decided to take a stroll down the beach a few days ago during the afternoon to try to get on some beach Snook feeding action, but what Chris found last week was not the traget species, in-fact it wasn't a species at all, but a refugee raft that had washed ashore behind what locals reffer to as "Millionaire Mile" on the South Eastern Coast of Florida. The story directly given to me from Chris wasn't the most exciting, he didn't watch the raft come ashore and see a hoard of reugees making a mad dash for the highway, but rather a quiet and somewhat somber discovery. Chris approached the raft to take a couple of pictures and make a few first hand observations before pressing on in his pursuit of the linesider, but from what Chris had said, the materials that made up this craft were somewhat simple and basic, these being styrofoam, Thing galvonized sheet metal, and wood splints of some sort. Chris also noted that the sheet metal had holes poked in it all throughout the craft wherever the metal was present, possibly from being part of an old roof on Haiti or Cuba.
But the most interesting part of this story is the lack of the Coast-Guard markings on the craft. Usually, when a craft is reported or found, the Coast-Guard will go out to the location of the craft and spray paint it with some sort of neon color, to signifiy that the craft had been found adrift, with or with-out humans inside of it.
What happened to the builders and occupants of this raft? The truth is we may never know. They may have met a watery fate at sea, or perhaps saw the lights from shore close enough and tried to swim to the U.S.A , maybe they reached land alive, maybe they didn't. But one thing is certain, in the end, you just never know what will happen during your travels in the state of Florida, and thats why we always go back for more.
