Tom_in_orl's Gallery

That is Gulf Shores, FL up in the panhandle. My family and I were up there for forum member rcmay's wedding. We had a few hours to drive around one morning and these two guys pulled up in that boat. They had carried it down to the water from their truck earlier in the day and were finishing up. While they were up at the truck getting ready to carry it back I took that picture. The story behind the colors is that the guys wife didn't want an ugly boat laying around the house so she decided to make it more colorful by painting it herself. The guy was surprisingly not bothered by it.

 

Thanks guys!

 

Camera is a Nikon D40. Lens was a 18-55 MM and set at 55 MM. Distance was about 30 ft away and 10 ft up. My son who was 7 at the time was with me in our Gheenoe LT 25. We were on the north end of the island where Darwin's Place is located in ENP fishing a creek mouth on a fairly slack tide. The entrance to the creek was covered by low hanging mangroves. We were hearing a crying noise that we attributed to a bird that was in on the island somewhere for several minutes but didn't think much of it when we decided to slip under the mangroves and see if we could find a snook spot.

When we slipped through the mangroves we were in a small pond area 30' in diameter. The bobcat was on the far side on a branch over where the creek continued into the island. We saw each other at the same time and the bobcat immediately started to slowly move away. It was a split second decision to grab the camera and I was fortunate that it was available. I might have whistled to get it to look at us one more time. The shot was a fast point and shoot. Not time to do adjustments. I was only able to get two full profile shots and the cat was gone.

Once the encounter was over and I knew I got the shot there were several after thoughts. First was our safety. We were very close to a large wild animal. Second, I had falsely thought that a bird was making the crying noise when it was a nearby bobcat. 3rd was to verify the species with a FWC biologist. Guessing at the size of the branch that the bobcat was standing on I estimated its size. I estimated it was the size of a large German Shepard dog and around 80lbs Then I checked Internet sites for the largest bobcats killed by hunters. This one exceeded anything I could find. I will probably go back to that spot this spring and measure the tree just to see how big it really was.

Original post with the bobcat is here:

http://www.microskiff.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1235829705