Lake Okeechobee Tributaries

These tributaries of Lake Okeechobee are an outdoorsman's paradise, and should only get better with time.



We paddled downstream on tea-colored water into a kind of slot canyon formed of cypress and cabbage palm. A black-bellied whistling duck, ensconced in a hollow palm trunk, squealed a few notes of surprise as we passed. From farther back in the woods, in an oak hammock above the high water mark, resonated the yelp of an Osceola turkey.

It was a beautiful scene with a lovely score, but a normal-headed boater might have found a discordant note in our chosen route. The water level gauge on Fisheating Creek was just shy of 1.3 feet. That's quite a bit below the 2 to 3 feet range the park concessionaire in Palmdale recommends for optimal paddling. Phone reconnaissance revealed numerous portages, especially going upstream. Downstream, we'd have a bit more water—but we'd face the uncertain prospect of returning into the current. No one was going to pick us up.

As it turned out, the only hard thing about returning upstream was mustering the effort to leave a fisherman's paradise in our wake.

Fisheating Creek, as the name implies, offers great fishing. The label is a translation of a Creek/Seminole expression, Thlothlopopka-hatchee, meaning “the creek where fish are eaten.” My fishing buddy Dennis and I made good on that, but stopped short at the eating part, relying instead on the ice-cold mangos I'd brought for sustenance.

The creek, which runs 50 miles through Glades and Highlands counties, is one of two large natural tributaries of Lake Okeechobee. Its character is very different from the other tributary, the Kissimmee River. The Kissimmee, a much larger waterway, was dammed and channelized in the 1960s in the interests of flood control; some stretches have been restored in recent years. For the most part, Fisheating Creek flows, floods and recedes as freely as it did when Native Americans used it as a canoe highway from Florida's west coast to the east. Tucked in the woods and flatlands along the creek is evidence of Florida's earliest settlers—including places where they may have once raised corn.

Both waterways terminate at Lake Okeechobee, arguably the world's most famous largemouth bass fishery. But if your idea of bass fishing is pitching soft plastics through hydrilla mats, drifting huge wild shiners and zooming home with 250 horses at your transom, you're in for an awakening.

At low water, Fisheating Creek is Florida's answer to a mountain trout stream. The creek changes character frequently. You'll glide along a narrow riffle, bumping the sandy bottom, only to find it opens into a deep, 100-foot-wide pond. There are miniature oxbows, with sandy shoals. Tight bends have deep banks cluttered with roots and fallen trees. Some stretches are overhung almost entirely with branches, while others sparkle under the open sky.

This is perfect canoe water. Mine is a 16-foot Old Town Camper, made of Royalex, a lightweight, multi-layer composite. It weighs about 60 pounds, has only slight rocker and a mostly flat bottom. Though not especially quick, it paddles easily.

To start, Dennis fished with a 132-ounce black-and-green Beetle Spin on a 5-foot ultralight spinning rod. The little 1000-series reel was spooled with 4-pound-test monofilament. I worked a bumble-bee pattern soft popper fly on a 7-foot, 6-inch 4-weight flyrod.

Both rigs worked extremely well practically everywhere we fished. I'm sure that was due in no small part to the low water conditions, which had concentrated the fish into the remaining available water.

Fishing in the canoe, we cast to shorelines in the open ponds, where we caught fat, purple-black bluegills. Dennis got a Florida gar. Next to deep bends, we beached the canoe to walk. There, we picked up warmouth sunfish, tough little fighters with the looks and attitude of groupers. Many bites turned out to be spotted sunfish, a humble panfish whose color patterns come alive as you look at them. Bass were abundant. We saw, and heard, some impressive strikes—particularly at dropoffs where the creek intersected still backwaters; lots of minnows congregated here. Most of the bass we caught were 12 inches or less. But of course, on small waters, your expectations adjust.

My experience on Fisheating Creek contrasted sharply with visits to the Kissimmee River. The 100-mile Kissimmee drains some big-name fishing waters, including Lake Tohopekaliga and Lake Kissimmee, both of which have been on hot streaks in recent years. But the river, which is still undergoing restoration, hasn't reached an ecological balance to provide the right conditions for fishing.

I found this out after some discussions with Lawrence Glenn of the South Florida Water Management District. Whereas Fisheating Creek is an absolute cornucopia of gamefish, one can struggle mightily to catch fish on the Kissimmee. They both enter the same lake. What gives?

The Kissimmee is big water, and I'd fished it in my 19-foot Hewes. On a number of trips, we launched at various public access points. The water looked good. We cast worms and plugs to current-swept points and sandbar drop-offs. We pulled spinnerbaits through marshy backwaters, threw popping bugs along pads. We caught a few small bass, but mostly we caught bowfin, or mudfish. An abundance of these muscular, primitive fish can be symptomatic of low oxygen levels in a river or lake. Like tarpon, mudfish can get a little extra oxygen by gulping air.

The best-looking water was within the 24 miles of restored river channel, which we explored from Chandler Slough upstream to Fort Basinger, and from the S-65C launch ramp north toward Bluff Hammock. A little north of the S-65C ramp, named for the dam built there as part of the original channelization project in the 1960s, we were confronted by the contrast between the manmade channel—yet to be refilledand the natural, course of the free-flowing river. Steering off the remnant of the broad, deep channel, we entered a beautiful, winding creek, bordered by lily pads, arrowhead and other vegetation. At high water, the river can spill over its banks into a broad, 2-mile-wide floodplain. Some parts are forested, reminiscent of Fisheating Creek, while others resemble Florida's vast Upper St. Johns River marsh.

Lawrence Glenn is Lake and River Ecosystems Administrator for the South Florida Water Management District. The Kissimmee restoration, as he explained, began with Congressional approval in 1992, and has involved two key areas. One is reestablishing the “physical habitat template” of the river/floodplain system. Heavy equipment operators are, quite literally, pushing dirt over the misdeeds of an earlier generation. “The canal is backfilled, and remnant river reaches are relinked, resulting in a contiguous, serpentine stretch of river channel,” Glenn explained. Drainage features are closed off, and water levels are allowed to spill over into the adjacent flats, forming seasonal wetlands.

The second key component—returning the water supply to historical levels— has yet to be fully realized. The Kissimmee again has the space to rise and fall with rainfall, like its southern neighbor, Fisheating Creek. But, flood control operating rules for lakes upstream of the restoration area—including Lakes Kissimmee, Hatchineha and Cypress—have prevented natural flows.

“Reestablishing historical hydrologic conditions will not occur until all construction of all project features is completed in 2019 and will be accompanied by changing the operating rule at S-65 that is the single greatest source of inflows to the Kissimmee River,” Glenn wrote in an email.

The way the system is currently controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Water Management District, high discharges of fresh water at the beginning of the rainy season— made to keep water levels below a certain point on the lakes—have coincided with troubling drops in dissolved oxygen levels downstream. Glenn's team also hypothesizes that high discharges, rather than ramping up naturally, may disturb eggs or fry from fish beds in the river channel. In a natural system, with water levels gradually rising and spilling off onto adjacent wetlands and fractal side channels, fish reproduction would occur in broad, vegetated shallows.

Glenn's studies reveal that the Kissimmee is dominated by mudfish and other species tolerant of low oxygen. The abundance of centrarchids, which includes largemouth bass and other sunfish, is low. But, Glenn has documented periodic blooms in their numbers in some seasons, and he expects populations to really take off as the headwaters regulation schedule is implemented. The District has been working to purchase buffer lands along lakes Kissimmee, Cypress and Hatchineha to help with this.

The restored Kissimmee will no doubt be a spectacular fishery—probably something like Fisheating Creek writ larger. And that is a tantalizing prospect. As for my own research, I aim to keep returning in the years to come. But for the near future, I'll be carrying my shotguns more often than my fishing rods.

Along restored stretches of the Kissimmee, marshes load up with blue-winged teal in the fall. Farther up in the grassy, mud-bottom plains, snipe settle in following their winter migration.

Public hunting is available on the 30,804-acre Kissimmee River Public Use Area, managed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. This is one of the more liberalized areas, having a number of hunting seasons that permit access without special quota permits. That includes Archery, which begins August 1 on lower reaches of the river, below State Road 70.

The Kissimmee is very popular among hog hunters, many of whom use airboats to move around in the marsh.

Fisheating Creek offers excellent hunting, too. Dennis and I saw turkey and deer tracks on the sand bars, a hen wood duck with hatchlings, numerous black-belly whistling ducks in the tree cavities. The black-bellies are something of a recent addition to the panoply of waterfowl which annually visits Florida—and by all evidence, they've decided to stay.

Parts of the Fisheating Creek watershed, a little over 18,000 acres, are open to hunting during seasons established by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The proximity of oak mast to a freshwater source, with availability of dry, sandy soil, means this is prime Osceola turkey country. Competition is very intense for the limited spring turkey quota permits, but it's always worth a try at www.myfwc.com/hunting. Look under “Limited Entry/Quota Permits.”

Fisheating Creek will certainly be a bit quieter than the Kissimmee, as airboats are restricted to a certain section closer to Lake Okeechobee. Hunters in upstream areas commonly use canoes to get around—or simply walk, if the water level is low enough. The FWC rules indicate that guns and other hunting gear may not be transported by the livery concession at Palmdale. You have to haul your equipment and your game. But as Dennis and I learned on our recent fishing excursion, getting around in those cool, majestic woods is a pleasure all its own. There are harder things in this life than taking off your boots and going barefoot like the Indians. FS

First published Florida Sportsman August 2015