Posts tagged “Everglades”

Devil in God’s Country

Posted on May 7, 2009

We made the commitment to try for 100 pound fish. So Ron Hyde and I spent two days hunting big tarpon in the Everglades from his Seminole Flats Skiff. The web of channels weaving through the vast mangrove islands is God’s Country, beautiful and unrelenting. Hyde has been catching big tarpon in this area since the 1950s. I have not–The biggest tarpon I have hooked on a fly weighed 60 pounds. These are different animals. Tarpon take 15 years to grow beyond the century mark and by that time, says  Hyde, “they’re big intelligent fish that can eat whenever they want, and they’ve seen just about everything.” The big female tarpon can live into their 50s. I’ve caught big tarpon by other means, but…

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Back to the Glades

Posted on May 4, 2009

The headwaters to the Florida Everglades start all the way up in Orlando, where Shingle Creek starts the flow of freshwater south to Florida Bay. Before the developers and the sugar plantations got to it, the massive flow moved unimpeded through a complex 8.9 million acre web of lakes, rivers, and marshes down into the mangrove estuaries of the southern coast. The Everglades hasn’t been what it is supposed to be in over a century, since the election of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward as the state’s 19th governor, and along with that his mission to drain the Glades, starting with the New River Canal in 1906. The National Park today consists of 1.5 million acres of protected wetlands.  It’s deathly hot, bug infested, wild, dangerous,…

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FLORIDA: Drought

Posted on April 20, 2009

Work last week brought me down to South Florida and then up the Space Coast and  into Central Florida, and the signs of drought are obvious. Old ditches on the roster are currently unfishable due to the dropping water levels. Central Florida seems to have it the worst. “We could really use a hurricane this year,” one of my fishing accomplices remarked, “only without the destruction. Maybe a tropical depression.” He was hoping for something to fill Lake Okeechobee again, like Fay did last September, so that the State doesn’t have a mad rush over the diminishing freshwater supply. It has been the third driest dry season on record since 1932. There are too many stresses on Florida’s fresh water supply as is. With…

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FLORIDA: One Development From Disaster?

Posted on January 16, 2009

The above sat photo illustrates a lot of what is wrong with my favorite state. Look at the encroachment of suburban development heading inward from the coasts across land that is supposed to be swamp. This article from Alternet looks at what this does to the water supply, and the supposed rehabilitation of the Glades. Quote: The fast eastward creep of southwest Florida’s development is mirrored by continued inland creep from the state’s east coast. Grunwald wrote in The Swamp, ‘In coming decades … South Florida could become an uninterrupted asphalt megalopolis stretching from Naples to Palm Beach. Perhaps it could be called Napalm Beach.’”

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