One cold, cold morning , back in the 60's during hunting season, a friend of mine and I went into Piney Bay from the north end.  It was about 8:30 in the morning and our dogs had bayed-up a bear, or so we  thought.  And we knew that when dogs "bay-up" something, that meant that they had cornered up something and were looking at whatever they had bayed-up, or they had run something up a tree, or something they had bayed-up had stopped and they wanted to fight it.  Whatever the reason, once dogs have bayed-up something, it's almost impossible to get them to come to you when you call them.  That leaves you with two choices; you can either wait for them to come out on their own, or you can go in and get them.   And because we knew it was not uncommon for dogs to stay in a situation like this for days, we knew we had to go in and get them.  (Back in the 60's and early 70's we had quite a few bears  and a large assortment of other wildlife here.  I don't know how many bears are left in this area, but we still see huge, black alligators, otters (as big as a large basset hound), deer, raccoon, fox, swamp rattlers, rattlesnakes, moccasins, cottonmouths, wild turkeys and a lot of bobcat tracks.)  Anyway, we were young then and at that time, not too scared of  too many things in the woods.   So we went into the swamp at around 8:30 AM to get our dogs.

   Piney Bay swamp is only  a mile long and maybe 1/2 to 3/4 mile wide.  So when we started into the swamp to get our dogs, we tried to go in as straight of a line as we could to get to where we could hear them baying, but that's not an easy thing to do in a swamp.  Each time we got within 50 feet of where we could hear them baying, they would move.  It was so thick with vines we couldn't even see the dogs. We tried to keep up with the sounds of their baying the best that we could, but each time we got close, they would move again.  After about three hours of trying to catch our dogs, we were very cold and wet and were cut up badly from all the cat claws.  We were incredibly tired of walking through the muck and of tearing our way through the vines.  And the water moccasins (snakes) we saw were bigger than your arm.  So we decided to get out of the swamp and wait for the dogs to come out by themselves.  Well, deciding to get out and actually getting out were two different things entirely.  Getting out sounded simple enough, or so we thought.   After going around in circles for hours trying to get out, we sat down  and asked each other, "How are we ever going to get out of here?"  Others hunters were hunting with us that day too, so we fired our rifles quick a few times to get their attention, but we never heard anyone fire back.  So while we sat resting, trying hard to figure out how to get out of the mess we were in,  we noticed that we could faintly hear vehicles in the background on a highway from a long distance away.  We decided to walk in the direction of those sounds.   Finally, at about 4:00 PM that afternoon, we made it to dry land on the south end of the swamp.  We collapsed, out of sheer exhaustion, right in the middle of a dirt road.  After about an hour of lying there, one of our friends rode down the road we were on, stopped when he saw us,  and asked us where we had been.   We told him our story - that we were trying to find our dogs in the swamp and barely made it out of the swamp ourselves.  He told us that our dogs had been out of the swamp for hours, that they had been picked up by the other hunters outside of the swamp at around 1:30 PM that afternoon.  Exhausted and weary, we had no sense of humor to laugh at the irony of it all.  He gave us a ride back to our trucks and that was the last time either one of us went into the Piney Bay swamp.

   Years later,  in the late 80's or early 90's, two other hunters went into Piney Bay.  Search teams, dogs and helicopters had to be called in to help find them.  The hunters ended up spending one night and two days in the swamp before help could get to them to lead them out of the Piney Bay Swamp.

NOTE:  Here is an interesting bit of information about Florida Panthers.
Panthers May Be Moving North January 2, 2004
Release from :Craig Pittman/St. Petersburg Times

   For decades, Florida's remaining panther population has hunkered down in the cypress swamps and hardwood hammocks of Southwest Florida, driven into hiding in the tip of the state's peninsula. But it's not enough. In the 1990s the panther population grew even as development wiped out thousands of acres of panther habitat. The combination left young male panthers so little room to roam that a few left South Florida in search of new territory. One made it as far as the outskirts of Disney World. Now some panther experts are recommending that female panthers be transplanted to the north in hopes of establishing a panther colony in Central Florida. It's the only choice if this panther population is to continue growing, explained John Kasbohm of the  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.