"Aquaholic."
The word was scrawled across the dusty back window of a van crossing the Howard Frankland. Was it a cry for help? The marine equivalent of a scarlet letter? Or simply a declaration that the driver was addicted to the water and damned proud of it?
The two kayaks strapped to the roof suggested that the third option was correct (though I couldn't rule out the possibility that the graffiti was the work of a fishing widow, or widower). Whatever its provenance, the neologism struck me as one that would fit any number of Tampa Bay residents.
"Hello, my name is xxx and I couldn't stay away from the water if you paid me."
Most of the people profiled below are being paid for their addiction. But even the ones who don't make their living in the water get compensation: the sheer joy of splashing around.
Stayce McConnell, mermaid
On land, Weeki Wachee Springs performer Stayce McConnell is undeniably attractive — lithe, blonde, with the carriage of a dancer. But when she's underwater, in full mermaid mode, she's more than just pretty — she's magic.
Does water instantly add inches to a person's height? Maybe it's the tail — the long floaty sheath she wears over her swim flippers. More crucial than either of these, though, is her grace and ease of movement, as if she's been living in the water forever.
Not forever, but close. At 29, she's been in the mermaid corps at the legendary water park for nine years, long enough now to train the younger mermaids as well as perform in three shows a day, four days a week.
McConnell has played every part in Weeki Wachee's cheesy but charming version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, from sea turtle to sea witch to the title character. The mermaids don't get paid much more than minimum wage, but they seem genuinely elated when they're singing (or lip-synching) lines like "We've got the world by the tail!"
"There's nowhere else in the world that's like this," says McConnell. "We perform right in the middle of the spring. It's quite a privilege." She also works as a bartender at the local Applebee's, where there's a photo of her on the wall as a mermaid, so she's used to giving impromptu "Weeki Wachee 101" lessons to her customers.
She's heard all the questions. Does she wear a weight belt? No. Do the mermaids swim in a tank? No — the springs are a natural phenomenon. Does she swim with the fishes? Yes. As well as turtles, manatees and even the occasional alligator. (She's also heard all the pickup lines, guys, so don't try to mime reeling her in — she won't bite.)
What are the secrets of the mermaid trade? Waterproof mascara. Learning to block your nose and navigate the air hose. Getting used to the long tube through which the mermaids swim so that they can make an entrance as if coming up from the bottom of the "sea." Keeping your flippers together while pointing your toes. And relaxing.
It's the mermaid mantra: "Just smile and breathe, smile and breathe — as long as you have a smile they won't notice the little mistakes."
McConnell doesn't know how much longer she'll continue mermaiding, but she admires the veterans who have returned to perform in anniversary shows (the park celebrated its 60th birthday last year). And she knows she'll never give up the water completely.
"I would be heartbroken if I couldn't come here once a month and get my swimming fix."
Mike Terrell, diver
Mike Terrell was always interested in underwater worlds when he was a kid, watching Sea Hunt reruns and Jacques Cousteau on TV, keeping a fish tank. But growing up in central Indiana, he didn't get the chance to dive till he went to college, and pretty soon he was hooked — so much so that, when he wanted to escape the stress of exams, he'd chill out in the pool. I mean, really chill out: He'd strap 20 pounds of lead onto his weight belt, let himself sink and then "just kind of zone out and lie on the bottom, "making bubble rings and (almost) falling asleep.
Not that he would encourage divers to make a habit of underwater napping. As dive training coordinator for the Florida Aquarium, his job is to make sure anyone who takes a dip is fully alert and well-trained, whether doing scientific research, cleaning an exhibit or swimming with sharks.
The Aquarium's Dive with the Sharks program gives SCUBA divers age 15 or older the chance to spend 30 minutes underwater among the fearsome occupants of the Shark Bay exhibit. Terrell says that the main challenge for amateurs is "to learn what divers already know, which is to give the animals the right of way." You don't, for instance, want to accidentally step on the nurse shark, which spends a lot of time on the bottom of the tank. But the Aquarium's rescue-trained divers are never far. "Guest safety is paramount."
Tall, lanky and looking a lot younger than his 32 years, Terrell has been in charge of dive training for a little over five years. He's not only familiar with the humans who spend time in the water, he's also become well-acquainted with the fish. Sitting outside one of the tanks in the Reef Tunnel exhibit recently, he pointed out a few of the local characters. The ominous-looking moray eel, despite its appearance, is "just a very mellow fish." The queen trigger fish, on the other hand, is "a total spazz." And turtles, he points out, can be a lot more dangerous than sharks.
Terrell is in the water from three to five days a week, from two to four hours at a time. He says that people's biggest misconception is that diving in an aquarium is not like any other job. The reality is, he has to deal with occupational irritants like anyone else. It's just that his problems — "wetsuit chafe, fish nibbling on you, rubber on your gums" — are a tad more exotic than, say, a printer jam.
And he allows that his line of work requires a certain kind of personality. "The people that do this would curl and up and die at a desk job."
That includes him.
"If I had the choice of sitting here or being in there," he said, looking a little longingly into the reef tank, "I'm in there."
Michele Cardinal, pool cleaner
"Peace."
When you ask Michele Cardinal why she started her own one-woman pool-cleaning operation, that's her answer. Getting a small business off the ground in the current economic climate would seem anything but peaceful, but she likes the idea of setting her own hours. She already has a full-time job doing investigations for a company that checks into workman's comp claims, so the pool work, which she does early in the mornings or on Saturdays, comes as a kind of respite.
And the routine of pool-cleaning is itself restful.
"It kind of forces you to slow down, take it easy," she tells me as I ride with her to a client's home in Treasure Island one Saturday morning. "If you move fast, if you disrupt things in the pool, you have to wait for it all to settle down. It's not like vacuuming your rug."
For Cardinal, 39, it's also a return to a world she knows well. After a stint in the Navy following high school, she worked at Walt Disney World Resorts as a pool chemist ("we liked to call ourselves aquatic specialists") while simultaneously getting a degree in behavioral psychology from Rollins.
Maybe drawing from that psych degree, she espouses what she calls a "Miracle on 34th Street philosophy" with her clients, teaching them about their pools so they can maintain them when she's not around. But this morning's customers, airline pilot John Foley and his wife Christine, seem happy to let Cardinal take care of things.
"She's the best pool lady around, " says Foley. "Since she's come over to do our pool, it's been immaculate."
Her routine changes depending on the pool (and the fee changes, too, ranging from $50-$125 a month). Today she begins with the skimmer net to remove a lot of the "big stuff." Next she brushes the side of the pool to get rid of algae. And then comes the vacuum, which she carefully guides along the bottom in a process that seems more painstaking than relaxing. "Painstaking for you more so," she tells me, "because you don't know the rhythm."
I begin to understand the appeal. The work brings the satisfactions of painting a wall or mowing a lawn — the results are apparent. And there's the allure of the pool itself, dappled by early-morning light, gently lapping against the deck. It is peaceful.
Cardinal gets out her chemistry kit: an array of color-coded little bottles, each one containing a reagent for testing the pool water's chlorine, Ph, calcium and alkalinity levels. Her white pickup truck is filled with tubs of baking soda and calcium chloride in case she needs to add any chemicals to the water.
When she's done, she blows down the pool deck (her rule: never use the blower till after 8 a.m.), chats with Foley about his outdoor spa, and we set off on our way. It's OK for clients to jump into a pool immediately after it's been treated and cleaned, but the Foleys won't just yet — the water's still too cold.
For now, they're content just to look.
[Full disclosure: Michele Cardinal is my next-door neighbor. We don't have a pool, but we'd hire her to clean it if we did.]
Flash Gordon, musician, woodworker, entrepreneur, swimmer
To the four occupations listed next to Flash Gordon's name above, you could easily add four or five or six more: club owner, composer, salesman, survivor, mensch.
Because Flash (née Gordon Williamson), 48, is one of those people who seem to have lived several lives already and who have fascinating stories to tell about every chapter. (Add 'storyteller' to the list.) And for the last 30 or so years, every evening except during storms and except when the weather gets cold, he's taken a swim in the Gulf off of Indian Rocks Beach.
"It's a very spiritual thing for me. I pretend I'm praying to Mother Nature that there's no hurricanes."
A native of Detroit, Gordon decided to make the Gulf Coast his home in 1978; at the time, he was working as a salesman for "the second biggest paraphernalia business in the country," and Florida was his territory. His first visit to Indian Rocks Beach sealed the deal; within weeks, he'd rented an apartment on the Gulf, and on the day he moved in he met a man fishing off the seawall. They hadn't spoken two words when the man reeled in two redfish.
"He looked at me and said, 'My name's Jim. Want to have dinner with us?'"
It was an auspicious beginning. Gordon has lived near the beach ever since.
The water lifts his spirit in another way. Gordon was diagnosed at age 14 with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological disorder which leads to progressive atrophy in the legs, feet and hands. He'd always known he walked a little funny and fell down a lot; then he heard a doctor tell his mother that her son had a "completely crippling" disease, and he knew he would never fulfill his dreams of being a star athlete. But in the water, his spindly legs don't matter as much; he's buoyant and strong (though big waves can give him trouble).
Not that he is in any way a victim. The swimming seems to have kept him in shape because, except for his legs, he's got the torso of someone half his age. If anything, disease made him drive harder, play harder, rebel harder. Not going to be a baseball star? Well, he'd be a star musician instead. Couldn't play the guitar or the piano? He turned to the flute. Hated shop class? He wound up opening a DIY woodworking shop (which evolved into the late, lamented Club More music venue), and now owns Greenbenches & More, a maker of outdoor wooden furniture.
Through all this, he's continued to write music; the rock star dream is still lurking. He had some success with bands The Pundits and Flash Gordon's Adventures in Music in the '90s, and he's still writing songs and recording them with his wife Jo Hammond (a former CL ad exec) singing lead vocals. Several of his songs were inspired by the water, including the one above, a lyric that seems to sum up his many lives.
Jean Totz, kayaker; Amber and Samara Saenz, swimmers
Amber Saenz, a former competitive swimmer, says she was surprised when her mother, Jean Totz, took up kayaking in her 40s. Totz had always been athletic, but her taste for water sports had leaned more toward collecting seashells on the beach than jumping into the deep.
But now Totz not only braves the waves in a small, sturdy boat, she’s president of Sweetwater Kayaks in St. Pete.
“That’s my mom,” says Saenz. “She got a pair of roller blades and [before long] she was in a roller blade marathon. She picks something up and then she’s the best at it.”
Saenz, 29, is not one for halfway measures either. She has loved the water since she was a little girl, spending whole days in the pool pretending to be a mermaid and bouncing off the bottom so many times her toes would bleed. She didn’t begin swimming competitively till high school, but once in college at Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington, she was fast enough to break school records and compete nationally. Now certified as a swim coach and instructor, she can also claim an achievement few other Tampa Bay residents can: She’s actually swum across Tampa Bay. Twice.
She remembers thinking while driving over the Gandy Bridge, “That would be the coolest swim ever.” In 1998 she got her chance to find out: Tampa Bay Watch sponsored a fund-raising event called the Open Water Challenge, a 3.1k swim from Gandy Beach to Tampa’s Picnic Island. The swim took her an hour and 45 minutes, a time she describes as “pretty medium,” but she loved every minute of it, so much so that she entered the race again the following year.
She was surprised to discover how shallow the bay was: “My hands were hitting the bottom most of the way.” Nevertheless, the experience of swimming in open water the first time was a little daunting: “There’s moments when you feel really alone.”
Except for the fact that her mother and father were kayaking nearby the whole time.
“He knew I was going to be eaten by a shark,” she says of her dad.
Greg Totz, a police lieutenant, is a partner in his wife’s kayaking business but otherwise “he’s a landlubber,” says his wife. Saenz’s husband Roberto, an organic farmer (with, coincidentally, Sweetwater Farm), also prefers staying on solid ground: “He’s a cat in the water,” says Amber. “He kind of like shrivels up and makes a sour face.”
But for mother and daughter, the life aquatic will never lose its allure. Jean Totz, 55, a former dental hygienist, remembers working for a dentist who was such an avid kayaker that he had a photo of himself in his boat mounted on the office wall. “That is what I want to do,” she thought when she saw that photo (kind of like her daughter’s recollection of looking longingly at Tampa Bay).
After getting to know and love the possibilities of kayaking — “I was amazed at what you can do and places you can go” — she joined with friends 11 years ago to purchase the business that grew into Sweetwater. Since then, she’s been all over the world with her sport, from Sweden to Baja to Vancouver, including one race in which she paddled 68 miles in 22 hours.
But paddling for days at a time is not her first preference. What she really loves is open-water sea kayaking.
“It’s a whole sensory experience where you smell the salt air, you feel the wind, the current. You’re totally involved in the marine environment.”
She loves the physical challenges, too, like negotiating the kayak in the surf and learning how to roll. And she feels safer in a kayak than on any other kind of boat.
“I’d rather be in a kayak than in a ship,” she says. “You’re so much more in control of your vessel.”
Not that she’s going to head out too far. Her ideal: “When you can see the horizon on one side, and land on the other.”
Mother and daughter have a mutual respect for each other’s skills in the water, though neither is about to adopt the other’s sport. When it comes to kayaking, Saenz prefers “drifting slowly through mangrove tunnels, going somewhere mellow. But my mom will take off in open water in a rainstorm, with a high wind.” Yet her mother’s not that great a swimmer, says Saenz. (In a kayak, she explains, “you wear a lifejacket.”)
Both have long been involved in teaching, Saenz most recently at a private swim club in Clearwater, and Totz through a wide range of kayaking classes offered by Sweetwater. Saenz has lately been engrossed in her favorite student, her 3-year-old daughter Samara.
“I love being in the water with her,” says Saenz. “I almost cry every time I take her to the beach, it’s so beautiful.”
Samara’s not “a complete swimmer yet,” says her mother, but she’s “very willing and open.”
And what are some tips for teaching children to swim? Just throw ‘em in and see what happens?
“No,” Saenz replies emphatically. “I would never do that.”
The main things she teaches are breath control and floating “on their tummies.” Because when kids learn with flotation devices like water wings, they get used to swimming vertically, not horizontally — which means they’re not swimming, they’re jogging.
Most important of all, she teaches parents how they can be comfortable seeing their children in the water. Coming from a family in which love of the water flows through three generations, she knows whereof she speaks.
Matt Garrett, marine researcher & Poseidon adventurer
I should have known. Who else but a bunch of marine biologists would throw a costume party called “Astronauts vs. Aquanauts”? I’d heard about the bash from Creative Loafing’s Street Team leader, Shawn “Alfie” Alff, who was hosting it as a combination birthday party / engagement celebration for himself and his fiancée Cheska Burleson. Turns out Cheska is a marine biologist with the state’s Fish & Wildlife Research Institute near USF St. Pete, and so were many of the other sea creatures in attendance.
Among them was the king of the ocean himself, Poseidon, aka marine research assistant Matt Garrett. Outfitted with puffy white wig, toga-like vestments and the obligatory large trident, he granted a brief interview in which he explained that his job can be tough, given that most of the earth is ocean. But he does get to do nifty things like drive his trident into the ground and cause earthquakes, so all in all he’s got a pretty cool job.
So does Matt Garrett. His interest in the water goes back to his childhood in St. Louis, when his father would take him and his three brothers on boat trips on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. When the family moved to Chicago, he visited the Shedd Aquarium, where he got to see underwater life he’d never encountered before.
“I was just, you know, I don’t know how to describe it — I was just enthralled by it. It was just a whole ‘nother world… something that was so alien to everything I knew.”
His older brother was fascinated by the water, too, and went on to study marine biology at Eckerd College, and Matt followed in his footsteps. Both brothers wound up working for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which operates the research institute; his brother is in the manatee division, and Matt studies red tide (also known as Harmful Algal Blooms, or HABs).
You might think that hanging around red tide and its after-effects would be a surefire way to cure anyone’s love of the ocean. Matt allows that there have been difficult moments — like the red tide bloom of 2005.
“You really had to see it to appreciate it, to see how extensive it was, the death — just slicks of dead fish everywhere.”
(It’s the fish decomposition, by the way, not the algae, that produces the well-known stink of red tide. It’s the algal blooms that kill the fish and cause humans to cough and sneeze.)
But even when the working conditions get unpleasant, Garrett wouldn’t trade his job for an occupation that kept him land-locked.
“This really sounds clichéd… but if you enjoy what you do, you’re willing to put up with the bad stuff, when it sucks, or stinks… When you’re out on a boat on a Wednesday and I think of my [other two] brothers and they’re in an office somewhere with a shirt and tie… that’s when it’s OK.”
This article appears in May 7-13, 2008.