The Dark Side of Disney - Leonard Kinsey [54]
I’d probably been exploring for a good 5 years at that point, so I was pretty confident in my abilities to blend in and talk my way out of trouble.
So let’s get into the Discovery Island exploration. Had you been there as a child? If not, how did you find out about it?
Nope, I never actually went there while it was open. I heard about it from some local Orlando explorers that had read about it.
It seems like there was a primary, aborted attempt to reach the island. Explain why that first attempt failed, and what drove you to take the time to plan a comeback instead of just giving up?
Well, it basically came down to bad intel. The locals that had scouted it out before we came up had told us that there was “infrequent” traffic on the lake and that it was only about 150ft to the island from the nearest land. We snuck an inflatable boat, pump, and 200ft of clothesline into the campground and planned on paddling across and then pulling the boat back to the other side using the clothesline so we could ferry multiple people across. When we got there it turned out it was more like 300ft to the island at least and there were 2 ferries that crossed directly in the water between us and the island every 5-10 minutes. It was pretty much impossible to do the way we had planned and it was far too cold to swim when we were there. I vowed to come back and figure out a way to do it in the future.
How much planning went into this second attempt? Was there a “mission statement” of sorts? In other words, did you know in advance what you wanted to accomplish, and how exactly you would go about accomplishing it? Was there a specific “money shot” you felt you needed to get, or was it more of a “this is how we’ll get over there, and once we’re there we’ll see what happens” sort of thing?
There was a fair bit of planning in terms of getting to the island, but none really for once we got there. We had no idea what we would find when we got there, so we left that in the air. We bought waterproof bags and tested swimming an equivalent distance with them in a lake behind my friend’s house in FL. We took towels, changes of clothes, snacks, water, and camera gear to explore. We planned on giving ourselves a few hours on the island and set a hard “turn around” time where we would start heading back regardless of if we’d seen the entire island or not.
Did you know about the gators and the “killer amoeba”[Naegleria fowleri, which gets into your brain via your nose and is almost always fatal] when you decided to swim across the lake?
Not really. We had talked about the possibility of gators, but we just figured that since it was a “Disney” lake they wouldn’t allow there to be gators that could come up on shore and potentially hurt guests.
Describe to me what was going through your mind as you’re swimming across Bay Lake in the middle of the night? This is the scariest part of the tale for most people, because it taps into some primordial fear about swimming in the dark, especially in the ocean or in a lake….
It was pretty intense but what was in the lake itself was the least of our worries. We were mostly concerned with getting caught by the occasional lake patrols and landing in a good spot on the island. Most of the swim was spent looking back towards fort wilderness and the area where we knew lake patrol docked their boats. We tried to swim as quietly