Manatee Hunt

Dear International Living Reader,

After a delicious lunch of stewed chicken, rice, and beans at Gentle's Cool Spot in Gale's Point, we boarded the little panga for the ride back to Belize City via a labyrinthine jungle canal system. But first, we were going manatee hunting!

Gale's Point is a locked-in-time fishing village at the tip of a skinny peninsula that pokes into the wide Southern Lagoon. Only about 300 people live here (including the Gentle family of the aforementioned three-table porch/restaurant). There are far more manatees than people here, drawn to the safety and warmth of the lagoon.

Our guide, John Moore, knows just where the "manatee holes" are--the places in the lagoon where warm water bubbles up. John expertly glided the panga into one of these hot spots and we waited patiently. Soon, he was pointing here and there as one manatee nose after another poked up from the water. It was crucial to look fast--manatees are mammals and they need air to breathe just like we do, but they can hold their breath for about 20 minutes and they only come up for a quick breath before submerging again.

Manatees, for those who have never seen one, look something like a giant sea lion. They have a grayish skin, tough and wrinkled, and they can grow to 13 feet and weigh up to 3,500 pounds. They have bristle-like hairs scattered all over their bodies and thick whiskers on their snouts.

"If you were a sailor at sea and it had been a long, long time since you had seen a woman, would you think a manatee was a mermaid?" I asked John.

"No way," he replied with a smile. "They're too ugly."

It had rained hard the night before--a torrential downpour with brilliant lightning strikes and loud rumbling thunder--and the water of the Southern Lagoon was dark and murky that day, making manatee sighting difficult. John steered us to a nearby bank of mangroves to see if we could spot other types of wildlife that live in this habitat.

"Always around May 24," John said, "the fruit rain comes. The thunder shakes the iguana eggs and makes them hatch, and the rain makes the fruit grow."

We took our time getting back to Belize. A series of canals had been cut here many years ago, used by mahogany dealers who floated the timber from points south to sell in Belize City. We followed this same route, spying a few herons and iguana along the way (too big to be newly hatched). As we came closer to Belize City, the overgrown jungle gave way to cleared patches of swampland topped by ramshackle shacks on stilts, every one with a dilapidated boat parked alongside and laundry draped over porch rails and bushes. Children jumped from wiggly broken docks and splashed in the brown water.

I thought about the fruit rain, and in my mind pictured little baby iguanas being shaken awake inside their hard shell and stimulated to break out into a new world of brightness and uncertainty.

Suzan Haskins
Latin America Insider, International Living

P.S. If you're ever in Gale's Point, look up fishing guide, manatee hunter and naturalist extraordinaire, John Moore. You'll find him at the Manatee Lodge at the tip of Gale's Point where he takes fishermen on quests for tarpon and snook. You can e-mail him at johnmoorebz@yahoo.com.