Trip the light FANTASTIC

We crossed the causeway at dusk, drove over the draw bridge, turned down a dirt road and wound through a towering grove of palmettos at the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge near Cape Canaveral.

The path opened onto a loamy beach, blanketed with kayaks.

"OK, grab a life jacket and a paddle and come make a circle around me," a fit woman called from the shore. "That's it. Spread out. Glad you all could make it."

We had fortified ourselves with goldfish crackers, bottled water and super-strength bug spray.We had come to see the light.

Our friends had seen it here last summer during a late-night kayak trip. They had raved about it, wondered about it, tried to describe it. It sparkles like diamonds, they told us. Like raindrops. Like thousands of tiny disco balls swirling through the river.

It dribbles off your paddle like strings of stars. It makes the mullet glow.

It's called bioluminescence, tiny illuminated creatures that swirl just beneath the surface of the water.

"What you will see out there are one-celled organisms called dinoflagellates that emit their own light," explained the fit woman, Elizabeth Mahan, who runs the kayak tours with her husband, Mike. "Out here, you'll get more than 100,000 of them per liter of water."

No one knows why they glow, she said. "Are they mating? Is it in self-defense?"

She paused and smiled, twirled her paddle. "I just believe God loves really cool things and he wants us to play with them."

Kayaks head upstream

The air was thick with mosquitoes. While Mahan showed us how to steer and steady our kayaks, we swatted our arms and faces, scratched our legs. Behind her, the sun slipped into the river, painting salmon streaks across the sky.

"Out there, you'll see the sea grass glowing, the little fish glittering ..."

Only a whisper of light lingered over the river as our flotilla drifted beneath the bridge. With two thin paddles fluttering on each side of every kayak, the boats looked like big dragonflies skimming upstream.

We zigzagged at first, then got into a rhythm. Behind us, I heard my older son shout, "I hit something, Daddy. I think it was a rock."

He shone his light stick into the river. Two bulbous eyes reflected the glow. "I just clocked a manatee."

A pelican dove into the water, its silhouette streaking across the shore. A pod of dolphins splashed feet in front of our boats. Overhead, stars started to peek through the blackness.

Little fish glitter

Mahan didn't tell us yet, but we should have guessed: We were headed for Mosquito Lagoon.

It isn't always this bad, she swore, as we swatted and scratched and bled in the darkness. When there's a wind, the bugs don't bother you, Mahan said. Tonight, there was no wind.

We were so busy slapping skeeters, trying to follow the kayaks across the channel, that at first we didn't notice the glow far below.

Then someone up ahead squealed. And someone closer gasped. A woman in a boat beside us sounded like she was moaning. "Oh. Oooh. I see it now. Oooh my, this wasn't what I had expected."

Streams of blue-green light, like wisps of translucent smoke, drifted in shifting clouds around our boat. Each time you dipped in your paddle, it shot a shimmering trail into the river, like thin streams of mercury swirling through the clear current.

We steered closer to shore, rimmed the crescent-shaped lagoon. Along the shore, where trees blocked the starlight, you could see tiny fish skittering through the twinkling sea grass.

"If you get a few kayaks together and paddle fast, you can set the fish flying," Mahan suggested. We teamed up, three boats in a row, and ghostly mullet started shooting up like Nerf rockets.

"I wish we could take it with us, put some in the turtle tank," said my younger son.

"I wish we could jump in and swim around in it, so we could glow, too," my older boy said.

We couldn't describe it, couldn't capture it on our camera.