How to Fund, Build, Save Our Mighty St. Johns River

• Blair Wickstrom is Senior Editor of Florida Sportsman magazine.

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The largest river in Florida, the St. Johns River is also our longest river, stretching 310 miles from its headwaters in Indian River County north to its mouth in the Atlantic Ocean near Jacksonville. In its heyday, bass anglers couldn’t find a better place to fish for big bass, according to professional anglers like Cliff Prince, of Palatka.

“I’ve been fishing tournaments on the river for 30 years and I’m not sure what has happened, but since Hurricane Irma in 2017 there’s very few bass over eight pounds being caught and there’s virtually no eelgrass on the St. Johns from north of I-4 all the way to Jacksonville,” Prince said.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has acknowledged the issue and has been actively trying to regrow eelgrass since 2020. The St. Johns Riverkeeper also started a program called SAVe Our River’s Grasses Expedition in 2023. But, still there is very little grass growing, leading to more questions than answers.

Enter Joe Balog and the Mighty River Recovery, a newly formed non-profit focused on one issue: to end the documented decline of the St. Johns River. Balog is a veteran outdoor media representative with a degree in fisheries science from Michigan State University. Florida can use energetic, educated guys like Balog right about now.

In the case of the St. Johns, Balog said there’s no smoking gun.

“It’s a death of a river by a thousand cuts,” Balog said. “There is virtually no eelgrass in this region of the St. Johns,” he explained as Capt. Bryn Adams, owner of Highland Park Fish Camp, drove us in one of the camp’s pontoon boats toward their 20-foot by 20-foot Lake Dexter Citizen Enclosure Project (CEP).

“We’ve worked with, and continue to work with, the FWC, the CCA and the Riverkeeper to work on regrowing eelgrass. But, there are so many unknowns. No data. And so many stressors,” Balog said.

Balog laid out a familiar list of probable stressors. First and foremost is poor water quality, caused by herbicide spraying, continued muck creation caused by decaying plant material, and environmental changes such as development in the watershed, warming climate and rising water levels. Not to be left off the list are the turtles and other herbivores that munch down on newly grown grass.

“If we can try and save the Everglades, we can save this single river,” Balog said as he stepped off the bow of the boat into Lake Woodruff, heading over to one of their recently built enclosures.

“In order to get answers, and not just more questions, we need people to help fund, build and monitor these CEPs,” Balog said. “We’re on these small controlled growth sites every week, but we need more of them and more people to monitor them. We need anglers to step up, and in…to begin finding answers to why eelgrass still won’t take hold in Florida’s mightiest of rivers.”

Call to Action: Mighty River Recovery

Contact Joe Balog with the Mighty River Recovery and find out how you can help fund, build or monitor new Citizen 
Enclosure Projects.

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