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LAKE CHOCOLATE: Bass Fishing Suffers on Okeechobee

Posted on: Thursday, 26 January 2006, 06:00 CST

By Eric Sharp, Detroit Free Press

Jan. 26--OKEECHOBEE, Fla. -- For 15 years, Art Ferguson guided anglers for smallmouth bass on Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie in summer and largemouth bass on Lake Okeechobee in winter.

Ferguson, from St. Clair Shores, now does his winter guiding on Lake Tohopekaliga and other lakes in the Kissimmee Chain 90 miles to the north. The reason is best explained by Don Fox's description of Okeechobee today: "It's a mess. It's a big mud hole. The water looks like a bottle of YooHoo," a chocolate drink.

For 100 years, this was one of the world's top bass lakes, where anglers could catch lots of largemouths with a real chance of landing a 10-pound wall-hanger. Now anglers complain that they can't find fish, businesses complain about losing tourists and sales, and environmentalists complain that the state and federal governments failed to avert a mess everyone knew was coming for decades.

The proximate cause of the problem is weather. Two hurricanes raked the lake in 2004 and a third hit last fall, ripping up immense areas of floating vegetation, bottom growth and cattails. But Fox, a Florida biological administrator, said the real cause is decades of mismanagement by agencies that regulate the amount of water held in the lake.

"The water level is over 15 feet" above sea level, he said. "To have a healthy lake, we need to get it down to no more than 12 feet. Everybody knows what needs to be done. But do we have the political will to do it?"

Dyer Drake is sales manager for the biggest Ranger bass boat dealer in Florida, Northlake Marine in Lakeport. He said the mess in 730-square-mile Lake Okeechobee, nearly twice the size of Lake St. Clair, has hurt his business.

"We were selling 10, 12 boats a month even in the slow time, then it shut right down," Drake said. "It's coming back now, but we need the water to clear up and the grass to come back."

Areas like Moonshine Bay and the Monkey Box, which once looked less like a lake than vast stands of tall grasses with channels between them, now are vast stretches of open, muddy water. Some anglers say they no longer recognize places they once knew like the streets of their neighborhood.

Homer Stephens of Noblesville, Ind., has fished on Lake Okeechobee for 25 years, "but now I'm totally lost," he said. "Used to be, I'd just follow trails I knew through the grass. I never had to use a GPS. Now the grass is gone, the water is so muddy you can't see bottom a foot down, and guys are tearing up props and burning up water pumps."

Ferguson said the loss of the plants that filtered the water also allowed the winds to stir up pollutants and phosphates, which had been buried in the sediment for decades.

"Last year was pretty bad, but this year was devastating," said Ferguson, who won $10,000 during a recent BASS tournament on Okeechobee. "Put it this way: I heard what had happened. Then I came down and saw what had happened. Then I moved to Toho," the nickname for Lake Tohopekaliga.

"It's not just that the grasses that used to filter the water and create the clarity are gone. The silt is covering the dead grass, and that reduces the areas where the bass can spawn. For a few years, you'll be able to find small patches of clear water and catch a few fish, like we're doing now. But unless they draw down the water levels and get the vegetation (restarted), eventually you'll see fish numbers decrease."

Lake Okeechobee was much bigger when it formed about 6,000 years ago. It collected water that flowed down from rivers to the north and slowly filtered it into the Everglades, the Caloosahatchee River estuary on Florida's west coast and the St. Lucie River estuary on the east.

The lake was still largely unspoiled in 1926 when a hurricane came through, blew most of the water into the town of South Bay and killed more than 2,000 people. That started the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on a program of ditching and diking that lasted until the 1970s.

The lake was surrounded by the Herbert Hoover Dike, a levee up to 45 feet high. In addition to offering protection from hurricanes, it let the Corps hold water to irrigate large sugar and vegetable farms created by draining the Everglades marshes. Environmentalists have filed several lawsuits demanding that the Corps drop the lake levels and stop the estuarine damage.

"The mess in the lake has made a lot of people mad, but a lot of other people aren't concerned," Fox said. "As long as they have water for their lawns and golf courses, they don't care what happens in Okeechobee."

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Source: Detroit Free Press

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