The solution is to lower the water, and the South Florida Water Management District and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are aware of it. This fall they were releasing water in an attempt to get the lake down. That won’t solve the problem, though. Gornak feels that in order to restore the critical vegetation and maintain the fishery, the lake level would have to be pulled down to 13 feet and left there for six or seven months.

Mother Nature has not been helpful in that respect. Hurricane Wilma, which raced across South Florida in October, added to what was already a summer of unusually heavy rains. The storm also churned up vegetation, in the same way the storms of 2004 did.

Politics also stand in the way of proper lake management. Influential sugar farmers in the Everglades Agricultural Area, south of the lake, insist the water managers maintain high lake levels for possible irrigation needs in drought times. It’s a double-whammy, because historically, floodwaters dissipated into Everglades marshlands now occupied by sugarcane. Big Sugar fights to keep the lake high in the dry season, and then, by virtue of artificial geography, stands in the way when drainage becomes critical for the health of the lake. A “drawdown” of Lake O means discharging the nutrient-rich fresh water through manmade canals to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries.

The discharges east and west amount to some 500 billion gallons a year, sent from the lake to sea in order to keep sugar farms dry. Residents of coastal areas, especially in Stuart and Fort Myers, are understandably upset by the gushes of water, which muddy the estuaries and threaten human health as well as wildlife and plants.

Activists on both coasts say that much more of the water must be drained to the south and that existing Everglades restoration plans are too little and too late.

“As far as the lake itself is concerned, it looks like we have lost the 2005 year class of bass and crappie,” says Gornak. ”If the water clarity and vegetation situation remains the way it is, we will probably lose 2006.”

See www.floridasportsman.com/confron and riverscoalition.org for more on Lake Okeechobee, the estuaries and the Florida Everglades.

FS