Buddy of the Hillsborough River
Moments Correspondent
Bob Luce, a retired laptop programmer who life in Carrollwood, likes to go out on the Hillsborough River in Temple Terrace in his inflatable kayak, where he will take close-up photographs of alligators, captures limpkins and their toddlers on the shore and terrific blue herons in flight.
Which is when he’s not pulling trash out the river. If the weather is reasonable, he goes out twice a week for about 3 hrs at a time. He carries 42-gallon and 18-gallon baggage with him and grabber tools of various lengths. He figures that over 12 decades he’s pulled about 50,000 gallons of trash out of the river.
Luce, 75, talked with the Tampa Bay Situations about the river, litter and how he approaches alligators.
You started out cleaning the Hillsborough River about 2009, you say.
I had begun a handful of years right before that cleansing up Sweetwater Creek.