Pelicans kept plunging into the empty slip next to us with a slap and a splash, loud as Olympic divers off the 30-meter platform. They were going after mullet . . . which also happened to be the specialty of the day (with two sides: hush puppies? turnip greens? or try the home-made pickled beets?) at the downtown coffee shop where we ate lunch. What shall I order? Hmmm. Millions of pelicans can't be wrong. And indeed they weren't.
At dusk on Wednesday we went for a walk, steering for the lights glowing on a wooden pier below the bridge. It was a little restaurant with a tiki bar, the walls covered with wooden plaques which, the bartender explained, honor locals who helped fund the reconstruction of the Titusville fishing pier (claim to fame: World's Longest Free Fishing Pier).
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| Target acquired! Dive! Dive! |
Looking for more info about the pier, which has been a Titusville institution for decades, I came across an essay that fascinated me. It's the full text of a speech by local resident Laurilee Thompson (a former swordfish boat captain), delivered a few years back, at a conference on the ecology of Mosquito Lagoon, our next stop.
This essay is well worth a read. Laurilee talks about growing up on the waterfront in the 1960s, a kid with the freedom to go off and mess around in a boat, all by herself, for hours if not days at a time, on the Indian River lagoon.
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