Close Encounters With the Swamps' Fiercest Predator

Still, Kent Vliet, a University of Florida biologist who once spent weeks swimming up close and personal with the denizens of an alligator farm to study mating habits, said experts can read gator signs well enough to mingle "reasonably safely." They learn warning hisses, mock charges, sizing-you-up bumps, the heightened aggression of mating or of mothers protecting nests -- and, most important, when to get out of the water.

But misreading or irritating one of the creatures can get your hand or foot chomped off -- or worse. Gators often store large carcasses in underwater snags.

And while most gators are "fairly easily intimidated" and willing to back off if properly challenged, Vliet said, they are also curious and don't see so well underwater.

"They aren't looking at this thing moving in the water thinking it's a person," he said. "They're thinking it's a dead raccoon or a duck or something."

Needless to say, some consider Fernandez loco. Beba, his wife of 22 years, dislikes his swamp diving but tolerates it -- as long as he calls immediately afterward to report that all his pieces, 10 fingers and toes, remain intact.

"I always knew when I married him he was different than the norm. He doesn't settle for just going the average," she said. When he took up sky diving, for instance, he relished waiting till the last second to yank that rip cord.

Other family members, she said, are less accepting. "My Cuban mother, her sense of adventure is walking around the block by herself. It's, 'For the love of God, Jose, why are you going out there again? Forget it!' "

Last month, Fernandez, a technician; Clemente DiMuro, an equine dentist; and DiMuro's stepson, Tony Oropesa, all slipped into a canal no wider than a car and cloaked by overgrowth. They had encountered 50 gators there a few weeks earlier.

"It looks like something out of 'The Monster From the Black Lagoon,' " Fernandez joked as he donned mask, snorkel and fins. He and DiMuro both carried Puig's wicked-looking custom knives, but Fernandez patted the sheath and said, "A false sense of security."

What they swim through might as well be liquid smoke. Light leaks down in smears and streaks though water stained by the tannins of decaying leaves. Thickets of sunken branches suddenly appear out of the murk, clutching at snorkels and wet suits as the swimmers squeeze through or flipper under, trying not to stir up rotting vegetation and fine silt lining the canal's bottom.

In such conditions, a gator shows up first as only a set of pale white marks in the darkness -- ovoid eyes, triangle teeth. Encountering a hulking 10 1/2 -footer in the dim, close quarters unnerved one friend of Fernandez's, a veteran spearfisherman who had seen more than a few large sharks in open water.

"He kind of lost it and he turned around and flew out of there," Fernandez said.

Fernandez, though, has drunk deeply of swamp water and become intoxicated. This is the latest and maybe most exhilarating in his string of adventure pursuits, from flying to competitive shooting to free-dive spearfishing.

"This is what life is about," he said.

"What are you going to do, just go to work every day, sit around weekends and be a schmo?"