Today we paddled on the Silver River upstream about five miles into the Silver Springs attraction. We put in at Ray Wayside Park, near where the Silver River empties into the Oklawaha River. The flow on the Silver River is about 850 million gallons per day (MGD) which results in a significant current. The trick to paddling up a river in this manner is to spend as much time as possible in the eddies on the inside of the bends. The river is simply gorgeous. Deep clear blue water with a sandy bottom. Wildlife was abundant: we saw turtles, alligators, otters, Rhesus monkeys and a multitude of birds including about a million Ibis. As we neared the spring we saw a different variety of wildlife: mammalian forms known as touristus yankeeus. If you were not careful you would be run down by a glass bottom boat. The squawk of the PA from the tour boats and the music from the shore speakers was a stark contrast to the natural sounds along the river.
After a brief circuit of the spring, we made a u-turn and enjoyed a relaxing float back down to the put-in.After our paddle we attacked the buffet at Barnhills in Ocala. After dinner we returned to yet another campfire circle where we told the usual river lies. One topic involved how many cubic feet/second (CFS) resulted from 850 MGD. After a prolonged discussion, no consensus was reached. Actually, this is a pretty simple conversion for a civil engineer who specialized in hydrology, but hey, I'm retired and I'm rusty. Besides my HP-15 was back in the coach. Anyway, here is the conversion:
(850)(1,000,000 gal/day)(8.34 lb/gal)(cubic ft/62.4 lb)(day/24 hr)(hr/60 min)(min/60 sec) = 1315 cfs
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