Billy's Island was named after Billy Bowlegs, the famed Seminole chief who used it as an encampment.  It looked like a good place to stretch our legs and eat some lunch.  We pulled the canoes into an old makeshift dock and had a bite to eat, watching swallowtails puddle in the mud.  We decided to take a quick hike around, just to see what kind of herps we could turn up.  The soil was quite sandy, and the vegetation thick and varied - palmetto, slash pines, oaks and cypress.

We found a few herps - a Southern Toad, several Anoles and a few Fivelined Skinks.  We would have liked to stay longer, poking around the rusted remnants of the old logging days, but we had miles of paddling ahead of us before dark.  It was time to get back in the canoes and continue on.

Leave Billy's Island behind, we passed the signs indicating the boundary for day use of the swamp - from here on in, the trail was ours.  Soon the trail marker indicated a left turn, and here things started to change.  The open clear waters of Billy's Lake were gone - now the passages were choked with vegetation, American Lotus and masses of floating Pipewort primarily.  It was open country here, with very few trees but thick with titi and buttonbush and other shrubs. The Pipewort was more than a foot thick in places, and where it wasn't growing, the American Lotus was.  Every foot forward was hard-earned with a paddle.

All difficulties aside, it was still a beautiful place to be, and during our rest breaks we contemplated the overwhelming amount of life present around us.  Along with the plant life, the air was filled with insects - bees, flies, dragonflies of various hues and sizes.  Underneath the water, who could know the countless billions of organisms there?  Along with the audible hum of insects were numbers of birds calling around us, but there was something missing; there were no human sounds.  No voices, no airplanes, no automobiles or lawnmowers, and most thankful of all, no cell phones!  We were truly visitors here and a small part of the overall integument.

On we paddled, forcing our way along the trail.  It wasn't quite like the delta reed-bed scenes in African Queen, with Humphrey Bogart towing the boat, Katherine Hepburn, and uncounted leaches through the muck and mire, but it was difficult enough for us to wonder when it would get easier.  Usually, the park people send a jon boat with an outboard up the trails now and again to chop the channel clear, but it didn't look like they had been up this trail for a while.  Speak of the devil - we heard an outboard motor, and soon spotted a small skiff with some park employees on board, coming down the trail towards us.  If we had waited another hour, they would have chopped a nice path through for us. 

Gradually, more and more trees crowded in ahead of us, and soon they closed in around and over us.  The trail channel narrowed, and the choking vegetation gradually thinned away to reveal water the color of ice tea.  We had moved on to another phase of our journey.