August 2008 Calendar Picture and Story

Thursday
Feb 9, 2012
1:21:38 PM

Welcome

Calendar Photo and Article For August 2008

Recently, Nora and I made a trip to join my parents at our family cabin on the north shore of Lake Okeechobee in south Florida. This picture was taken at the Harney Pond Observation Station near the cabin with my mom (Hilda, 80) manning the kite tether because she was better at keeping the huge thing in the air than any of us. When I tried, the kite crashed into Nora and nearly broke one of it's 10 rods, not to mention her nose! But with Nora watching and me manning the camera, Hilda was able to play out almost the entire spool of twine as the beautiful kite soared in the steady breeze.

The astonishing thing about the photograph is that the beautiful prairie you see stretching to the far horizon is actually the middle of Lake Okeechobee! ... Or at least what should be the lake!

My father, Bill, 83, pictured above cleaning fish with my nephew, Jared, is a native Floridian. In fact most of us pass by the house where he was born and raised here in Bradenton several times a week. From the time he was a young man, his father, uncles, and friends often went on camping / fishing trips to Fisheating Bay, on Lake Okeechobee not too far from where our cabin stands today. It was on one of these trips, in 1954, that his father suffered a burst aneurysm in his chest and died before they could drive him the 50 miles to the nearest hospital. He was only 51 and since I was born in 1956, we never met. It was four years later (1959) that my father purchased a little parcel of land and, with the help of his uncle, George Washington Flowers, built our family cabin.

As pictured, the cabin is almost five decades old and none the worse for the wear! Anyway, my point is, that since my dad first saw it, and certainly all of my life, Lake Okeechobee has never had as little water as it does today. In fact, in 1961 the lake flooded and the water reached about four inches above the cabin's elevated floor!

Here is a satellite photo of the entire lake with a red box marking the close-up section pictured below. As you can see, a vast expanse of the eastern portion of the lake is now dry grassland.

In the early 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers built the Herbert Hoover Dike (labeled above in two places) and surrounded the entire lake with a 30 foot earthen dam. While this did control the flooding, it also cut off the lake from the grasslands / Everglades to the south and stopped the natural flow of excess water which kept the glades from going brackish (salt intrusion into the fresh water).

The idea of the dike was to raise the water level of the lake from it's normal 12-13 fasl (feet above sea level) on up to 17-18 fasl, or higher, which provided a great reservoir for agriculture and urban use. When I was a kid I remember the lake fluctuating between 13 and 17 fasl. Anything over 13.5 feet and they would close the locks and the process of going fishing became more time consuming as you had to pass through the locks to go from the canals, kept at 13 fasl, to whatever level the lake was at.

This is the lock installation near our cabin and labeled above as Lakeport Locks. We are looking from the canal side of the dike.

So, for a while, with the dike and locks in place, they were able to raise the lake level quite a little bit. This extra water was pumped to provide irrigation water for agriculture, a backup source for urban areas and only what was left over went to the Everglades.

Do you know why engineers have red spots on their foreheads??? It's from slapping themselves and going duhhhhhh! Somehow it never occurred to anyone that, while they built nice levees around the lake to raise the level, there was no more water now than there ever was in the past!!! The increased water use, coupled with the drought over the last few years, have left the lake at the lowest level in recorded history!

So, thanks for bearing with me. That's the reason there are grasslands stretching for miles in the top photo instead of two or more feet of water. Not far from where Nora and my mom are flying the kite is where I caught my first bass and where my father caught his largest bass ever, an 8 pounder mounted to the cabin's living room wall.

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