The Best Everglades Boat Tours
Wooten’s Everglades Airboat Tours
My favorite place to take a thrilling airboat ride is five miles south of Everglades City at Wooten’s Everglades Airboat Tours. It’s a little farther afield, but the airboat rides explore a diverse section of wetland while the narrators and captains deliver an overview of the history of the Everglades with an overtly environmental and libertarian message. You may also want to take one of the 30-minute swamp tours on the swamp buggy. You’ll travel through spooky cypress swamp and spot alligators as well as North American crocodiles (the Everglades is the only place you’ll find these creatures in the United States), deer, snakes, and tons of birds. Wooten’s small zoo with native Florida wildlife gives you an opportunity to get as close to a Florida panther as you will ever want to be.
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Other Boat Tours
You’ve seen these embodiments of Newton’s Third Law—those tall boats propelled by air whooshing through their giant fans. With no outboard motor or rudder for propulsion and control, these boats can scoot through extreme shallows on their flat bottoms, perfect for swamp exploration. It’s an Everglades cliché, and a loud one, but fun. They are not allowed in Everglades National Park, but they buzz around the edges in the Ten Thousand Islands.
Lots of airboat companies offer competent tours with nature-focused narration, and one of the best is Everglades City Airboat Tours. The family-run business offers tours through swamps, mangroves, and waterways of the Everglades ecosystem. Along the way, you may be trailed by pelicans and see big alligators, wild pigs, ospreys, and incredible plantlife.
A quieter ride can be found on the Everglades Florida Adventures Boat Tours, a wonderful 1.5-hour motorboat tour departing from the Gulf Coast Visitor Center. The cruise is slower, following a loop through a dizzying number of the Ten Thousand Islands. Along the way, tour-goers are likely to see manatees, frisky bottlenose dolphins, bald eagles, and loads of smirking alligators.
Everglades Area Tours provides year-round, half-day, guided kayak ecotours assisted by a motorboat shuttle that carries kayaks and up to six passengers. Aptly named the Yak Attack, the tour strategy allows you to quickly get to the remotest and most beautiful paddling areas. All tours are guided by experienced naturalists. Motorboat ecotours, sea kayaking and camping trips, backcountry charter boat and kayak fishing trips, bicycle tours, and aerial tours in the winter season are also offered.
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