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Within the League of Paranormal Investigators there is always time to find fun stuff to do.
One of those items is our annual family day.
Other things we like to do, is looking for fossilized shark teeth at the Peace River (Arcadia, Florida).
It might sounds strange at first to look for shark teeth in places where it is least expected.
The reason is that Florida once (actually twice) was covered by the sea.
Evidence can be found in Miami where the city is built on top of coral.
In the early ages there was an abundance of sharks roaming the seas covering Florida.
Sharks normally shed their teeth quite often during their lifetime.
Those shark teeth will fall to the bottom and stay there for ages.
After Florida rose out of the sea the shark disappeared, but the shark teeth still remain.
That is why you still can find shark teeth in the middle of mainland Florida.
On a Saturday morning we left for the Peace River Expedition and drove to one of the more popular canoe places just outside Arcadia.
We rented canoes before from this place and thought they can use our business, especially in these tough economical times...
Wrong!
Atena and I where the first to arrive and paid for our canoe.
While waiting for the rest of the group to arrive we started talking with an older lady who seemed to be in charge of the place.
We asked some questions what the policy is about coming back after 6 p.m. and if it was ok to launch a canoe which one of the members was bringing.
The lady told us that even we brought our own canoe we still have to pay the full price (which was ok for the owner of the canoe).
During the conservation we seemed to slowly move ourselves into an episode of Fawlty Towers, a British classic comedy where the main character, played by John Cleese, runs a hotel but does not like the clients.
The main character shows his adversity to his clients by becoming very rude to them.
As part of a comedy it is nice to watch but after a road trip of 31/2 hours it is no fun to be kicked out because the lady in charge decided she did not trust us anymore.
Stranded in Arcadia we did not drive all that way to not look for shark teeth.
Luckily one of the expedition members was staying on the neighboring campground (Peace River Campground) and made some phone calls.
We where more than welcome at the Peace River Campground and 30 minutes later we where paddling to the area where we want to dig for the shark teeth on our "secret" hunting grounds.
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We paddled upriver and after 30 minutes we found a nice spot which had potential to find some shark teeth.
Spots to dig for shark teeth were easy to find because where we were looking for layers of dark sediment.
Those layers contain mostly small stones but also the shark teeth we where looking for.
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While most of the expedition’s members start digging for the teeth one member (Susan) took care of the BBQ which provided us with the necessary fuel while digging.
Overall the digging was not heavy because we used sifters which allowed us to easily filter out sand and keep the larger pieces with the shark teeth.
The hard work came from bending over for a couple of hours but the findings made up for this hard laboring.
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Ed was the one who found the first shark tooth.
Later he found a couple of nice tiger shark teeth too which where in a good condition.
Colleen found a couple of nice Sand Tiger Shark teeth and she won the honoree prize for the biggest and nicest shark tooth.
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During this trip all members were able to dig up a lot of shark teeth.
We found teeth of Tiger, Sand Tiger, Bull, Lemon and other sharks.
After being on the Peace River for a couple of hours we paddled back to Peace River Campground which turned out to be an adventure on its own.
Ed also discovered that jumping into a canoe does not work and that it takes few of hours to get the clothes dry again...
We also learned that digital cameras do not swim well and plastic zippie bags make excellent cell phone protectors.
We finalized this day with a BBQ and roasting marshmallows on top of a campfire.
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