Jason Holder, his family and neighbors at Windmill Point received a rare treat when Holder and his crew returned from fishing on Aug. 13. While washing his boat, he looked down to see an 11-foot manatee drinking the fresh water streaming from the motor.
“Look at this thing, drinking my water,” he yelled on a video (below) he uploaded to his social media page. “I had no idea we had those things here.”
The Florida manatee is a large, gray aquatic mammal that occasionally visits the Chesapeake Bay’s shallow waters in the summer. But the visits and sightings are few.
Holder reported the sighting to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which instructed him not to give the manatee fresh water because “if you feed it water, it’ll stay around,” said Holder. And that could be dangerous for the warm-water creature when the bay’s temperatures start to lower in late fall.
Holder had spent three days cobia fishing and says he always flushes the motor and washes the boat off when he returns his 35-foot boat to the boat lift. He was doing just that when he noticed a big shadow in the water. The manatee, which he said spanned the width of the boat at about 11-feet long, hung around the end of his dock—first drinking the water running out of the motor then slurping up the cool water running out of a garden hose—for about 20 or 30 minutes. The water depth at his dock is about three-feet, he said.
Holder said he had seen manatees on a trip to the Florida Keys but has never seen them in the bay or river. His neighbor, who’s lived in Windmill Point since 1960, told Holder he’d never seen one in local waters either.
According to the Save the Manatee organization, the gentle giants are just that — both gentle and giant. The average adult manatee is about 10 feet long and weighs between 800 and 1,200 pounds; however, they may grow to more than 13 feet and can weigh up to 3,500 pounds. Also known as “sea cows,” the slow-moving animals were taken off the endangered species list in 2017 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
