Looking out the glass sliding door late on a recent Saturday afternoon, I saw this down the channel. I grabbed by camera and went running out the door to the dock.

A manatee was rolling over, floating on his back.

Wait! There’s two manatees in the channel.

What’s going on down there?

Coming up for air. What a face!

The tail flap.  All of the above were taken with my 300mm lens and cropped up.

I thought they were heading back out to the bay so I went inside. I looked outside again later and they were right at our dock. I grabbed my phone and took these since they were so close. Standing on our dock looking straight down at the manatee.

At one point, there were 3 of them floating around our dock.

You can see the scars on his back from boats getting too close.

We don’t get manatees into our channel and close to our dock very often. We are at the very dead end of the channel so they rarely come all the way to our dock.  Only a few times since we’ve lived there for 12 years. I see them out in the bay when I go kayaking but this day the tide was high and they were cruising around. All of the neighbors were coming out on to their docks to see them.  They spent about an hour in our channel. What a perfect afternoon to be home.