FISH CAMP FRIDAY PLUS

Fish Camp Friday returns with a tale from Lunker Lodge in Georgetown, plus some storm porn and a few random images from my adventures.

The area from Dunn’s Creek down to Lake George is prime fish-camp territory.  Mr. B. and I headed there to investigate that and the Ft. Gates Ferry.  We also wanted to visit the National Fish Hatchery aquarium in Welaka.

We drove right through Welaka, a postage-stamped size town, slowing down long enough to notice that the aquarium appeared to be closed.  It, too, was small.  We continued down the road to Georgetown, a place that seems to be all about the bass, and there we found Lunker Lodge.

A sign at the entrance states that the lodge is an original Florida fish camp, established in 1920.  For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, someone has put quotation marks around “Est.” I will take a guess and say that either the owner or the signmaker felt that the abbreviation is subject to a special rule of grammar. Following this logic, we can then put quotes around “Ltd” and “Assn” and “Bros.”  Or are we dealing with irony? Was the camp a strictly informal affair in 1920 and only later a real business? Who knows?  We parked and got out to investigate.  An acre or so of land contained a few cement bunker-type cabins and a new cement walkway leading down to a dock.  No sooner had we set foot on the walkway than we were flagged down by a couple who had been standing a hundred yards away. “We’ve been spotted!” I said.

The couple turned out to be the new lessors of Lunker Lodge.  As is his usual custom, Mr. B. gave the reason for our visit as a look-see in case we ever decided to stay there.  This works in most instances, even if we never do return, and it lets me take a few pictures without feeling like a voyeur.

Larry Goodman, the lessor, explained that he was a retired railroad man who had taken out the lease on the lodge as a retirement business.  So far, business has been mighty slow, something we noticed at the other camps in the area.  Larry gave us a run down of his services:  cabin and boat rentals, guided tours, great food in the restaurant that would open on weekend.  This was almost my cue to start talking about my prize-winning seafood pie and incredible po’boys, but for once I kept my mouth shut.  Otherwise, there would be a platoon of fisherman out there carping that I’d fattened them into walking beachballs.

We took a walk out to the Lunker Lodge docks, where we were greeted by a large black dog and Larry’s friend, who was enjoying an al fresco picnic of crackers and Crown Royal.  Larry told us that for $150.00, he’d give us a 2 1/2 hour tour of the Ocklawaha River in exchange for our taking some  pictures they could use in their advertising and then we could have the boat for the day.  An in-kind agreement, but it made me wonder what our photographs were really worth.  Larry’s wife, a petite woman whose skin was baked the color of a raisin, showed us an album of blurry photographs from the river, the highlight of which was a fat and blurry cottonmouth resting on a rock.  “Don’t see those much anymore,” Larry offered.  “It’s brown banded watersnakes instead.” 

He asked if we’d taken a tour of the area.  We’d just come from a place called Porky’s Landing, where we’d walked out onto a creaky dock and where the wind had tried to snatch away Mr. B.’s Panama hat and had gotten his sunglasses instead.  Porky’s had a motel, a restaurant (closed during the week) and a bar.  “That’s where the movie was filmed,” Larry said.  He meant “Porky’s,” the low-budget, lose-your-cherry movie about a group of randy high school boys in 1954 Florida.  I was fairly certain that Mr. B. had never seen the movie, but I had, and the claim to local fame rang false.  Porky’s the place was a movie conceit, not an actual business, and its exterior was built in Miami.

After we toured the cabins (basic and clean) and promised to return for a hootenanny the Goodmans plan on having the third Saturday of each month (“Are you bikers?  Bikers are welcome”), we left and drove to the Fort Gates Ferry.  For ten dollars each way, this ancient little contraption (a barge with a tug) holds two vehicles that it shuttles over to the dirt roads of the Ocala National Forest.  Mr. B. very much wanted to do this, but as we approached the landing, I noticed a low-lying black storm cloud hovering over the forest.  I didn’t think that I wanted to drive the dirt roads (max. speed 10 MPH) for seven miles in one of those banging storms Florida gets in the summer, so we backtracked home the way we had come, through Palatka, stopping to admire an airpark where homes come with hangars and resident sandhill cranes attracted by the abundant fish at the nearby hatchery.

www.lunkerlodgefishcamp.com
www.georgiaboysfishcamp.com
www.bassworldlodge.com

The first sign that we were in primo fish-camp territory:

And another, sadly closed.

A slightly less elaborate sign decorates the entrance to the still functioning Bass World.

Judging from a few of the structures and some faded advertising, Dunn’s Creek Fishing Resort has been around for a long time.  An ad for Nehi made me think of Model-T Fords.

With the number of fish camps in the area, one wonders how the businesses differentiated other than by price. One way was through name. Another is through the size of the fish caught (bragging rights).  Still more would be type of rental boats and reputation of the fishing guide if you availed yourself of one.   Now, a Web site that is easily findable and has an attractive presentation may make a difference.  Bass World, which doesn’t look like much from the outside, has a great site.  If you visit any of the camps, keep in mind that the cabins are not high-end rentals.  You may also want to stock some good quality hooch.  I had the feeling that knocking back a few with the boys is the evening’s best entertainment.

The owner of Lunker Lodge has invested quite a bit in renovation.  Don’t mistake this for luxury, though.  The accommodations are Spartan, as they are at all of the camps. 

Mr. B. chats with Larry Goodman, new lessor of Lunker Lodge.

Empty ponds at the fish hatchery.  There is a small observation tower (and invisible nature trail) at the edge of the ponds.  Nothing to see at this time of year, however, unless you are a crane.

Porky’s

The following photo came out of my camera looking this way.  No filters, no Photoshop.  Huh?

Also not Photoshopped is this storm cloud that chased us away from the Ft. Gates Ferry.

Which had started out looking like this:

The ominous cloud did not prevent Mr. B. from getting some close-ups of the sandhill cranes.  Note:  This is a typical Florida storm.  See the clear sky beyond.  It was easy to drive away from this one.

I was prohibited by lack of zoom, so I took this inadequate picture of a bird on someone’s lawn.  We saw many of the magnificent creatures strutting around the airpark.

Hardee-Har-Har! Mr. B. stopped at a gas station on the way home to grab a burger while I grabbed a snap of their frontline scripting.  Corporate manipulation aside, it took the crew 15 minutes to serve up the burger.  “There was a spill in the back,” they said, “so we forgot about you.”  Top marks for following the “friendly greeting” dictum, with additional points awarded for honesty.  Points off for using “can” instead of “may.”  Of course they can.  You may not want them to.

Astride the St. John’s River in Palatka, the USS Tang Memorial to those who lost their lives in wartime submarine sinkings.  On display is a typical WW2-era torpedo, name of which I don’t recall.  The Tang was built at Mare Island in California.  The memorial is officially named the Basil C. Pearce, Jr./USS Tang Memorial, after a young submariner from East Palatka who was lost when the Tang was sunk by a circular run of one of its own torpedoes on October 24, 1944.

And a grasshopper, just because.

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A VERY SPECIAL FISH-CAMP FRIDAY

ORANGE LAKE HUCK FINNS

Orange Lake is both a body of water and an unincorporated community north of Ocala, Florida.  It and neighboring Lake Lochloosa are prime spots for bass fishing and are considered by many to offer superb fishing opportunities.  Orange Lake covers nearly 13,000 acres, much of which is dense with the spatterdock, reeds, and hydrilla in which the wily bass like to take cover.

Needless to say, fish camps are pocked around the lake.  These “resorts” appear to have year-round residents and their own societies; driving into one you feel as if you have intruded as much as you would intrude at a gated golf course community.  The same suspicion of the outsider–perhaps even more so–is evident in the way the residents look at visitors in shiny Japanese SUVs.  This is pickup territory–the better for towing one’s boat–and it is not the place to ask a stupid question, like “What’s biting?” or other urban-idiot interrogatory.  Fishermen are as full of secrets as lake honey-holes are full of the elusive bass.

Fishing in these lakes is both sport and way of life.  The fish camps house trailers decorated in such a way that they cannot be mere getaway; other trailers seem semi-permanent, used for weekends and vacations. Old mobile homes gone green by way of algae and moss on their siding creak with the sound of ancient window air-conditioning units. Each camp has basic amenities and necessities and a store of a sort, but this isn’t a luxury vacation.  It’s all about the bass, about the art and act of fishing.

There are a number of camps around Orange Lake and a public pier that is located in Heagy-Burry Park, just south of McIntosh. You can usually find at least a couple of people fishing from the piers, where besides bass they catch bluegills, warmouth, and crappie.  As is true with most freshwater bodies of water in Florida, you will also find alligators.  If you spend enough time on or near the water, you will learn to spot them; in their classic attitude of floating with eyes and top half of snout above water they can be mistaken for logs or clumps of vegetation. They hover, treading water, and then slide back into the murk like a sinking submarine.

Although I wanted to photograph a fish camp, Mr. B. reminded me that my barging into the camps feels as if we are crossing a border with a sign that reads None of Your Freaking Business.  I’d made the error of breaching a secret camp a few months ago, a mistake in judgment that made me feel as if I, and not the bass, might be prey.  For this reason I skipped Twin Lakes Fish Camp and headed north on 301, where I saw a small sign for the Heagy-Burry Park and the local fish pier.  The piers make me irrationally happy, especially if people are actually catching fish.  In many instances, you get the feeling that the catch of the day is the food source for the day. Today, the pier held a black woman of late middle age who was wearing a long, two-piece dress and a sun bonnet, and three boys, two of whom were around 11 or 12 and third, larger boy in a camouflage fishing hat who appeared to be in his mid-teens but had yet to acquire that leathery gaminess of older anglers.  Mr. B. and I walked to the south end of the pier and looked out over the lake.  The water level was low and the lake was full of reeds and lily pads.  The sun was sharper than I like, and at this degree I always feel that I have been struck by it.  We looked out over the lake, but from this angle it was impossible to tell its size.

To our left, the older boy in the camo hat was practicing some kind of ritual with a rope net.  Holding an edge of the net in his mouth, he used two hands to fling the net into the water, where small popping circles appeared about twenty feet from the pier.  The popping circles were the small silver fish known as shiners, which are frequently used as bass bait.  To catch these shiners, the boy took a handful of bait and flung it outwards.  Then he’d cast his net and quickly drag it in, pulling up weeds and tiny silver fish that he shook onto the pier.

I stepped over to photograph the shiners as they came up in the net.  I called them minnows. This terminological illiteracy amused all three of the young fishermen.  I’m from the city; I said, San Francisco, as if this would explain away my absolute lack of knowledge.  My photographing the shiners made the older boy instruct one of the younger boys to show me their prize catch.  The younger boy walked over to the edge of the pier and pulled at a line that held two large bass, which had been stored in the lake for safekeeping. He hauled the fish onto the pier and stood back while I took my picture.

The black woman who was silently dipping a line into the water suddenly pulled up something called a warmouth, a name I’d not heard before and which I had to repeat a couple of times to make sure I’d heard it right:  A warmouth? W-a-r-mouth?  The aggressive name pleased me; I imagined this small black large-mouthed fish marauding unseen in the dark waters, lurking in the grasses and reeds, lying in wait and then going in for the kill.  Despite its small size, it certainly looked hostile.

The sun was of a sharpness and the heat so intense that it caused me to need to return to my car for my Gatorade.  Warm Gatorade is my summer drink of choice, original flavor. I grabbed my outsized bottle and was headed back down to the pier when Mr. B. called out that there was an alligator in the water.

The gator was swimming around the area the boys were chumming.  They’d explained their bait as cat food coated with honey and vegetable oil, and I suppose the smell of this rank gourmet treat might have aroused the gator’s sense of smell, as the popping shiners probably aroused its sense of sight. It was a small gator that moved slowly in the direction of the bait before disappearing beneath the water.

Since we were obviously in the company of experienced fishermen, I asked the older boy about alligators in general.  I’m from the city, I said again, just to cover any stupid question I might ask, which, given the knowledge these modern-day Huck Finns had about this body of water, was going to be all of them.

The question about the alligators caused all three boys to “talk gator.”  They catch them inadvertently when fishing for bass.  Catch them? I asked.  Don’t they bite? Don’t their teeth carry terrible and deadly bacteria?

The older boy explained that yes, they do bite, but then he mentioned something I’d seen demonstrated at Silver Springs.  If you flip a gator on its back, it goes into some kind of gator coma until you flip it rightside up again. It should be obvious to anyone that this works best and most safely with very small gators.

My naive questions about fishing and alligators were met with polite answers, not smirks.  My enthusiasm (“Wow! No kidding! Holy shit!”) led the older boy to announce, matter-of-factly, that they would show me where there were even more gators.  They’d liked that I photographed their bass and the lady’s warmouth and had shown an interest in their activities. 

One of the younger boys piped up excitedly.  The place to see these gators was in back of the bar.  The bar was a one-story orange building a few hundred yards up the road, behind which were some old and crumbling boat slips and low marshy water.  The boys set out up the road, crossing some grass to get to the slips, but Mr. B. cautioned me that I might not want to go tromping through the grass after I asked the older boy if there were cottonmouths around.

Cottonmouths?  Sure!  Here was another topic in which he had a vested interest. He explained that just the other day, a cottonmouth had wrapped itself around the handle of his bait bucket, and before that another cottonmouth had gone after one of his fish.  He said this in such a way that I got the impression it was no big deal, and when we got to the slips he advised me that I might want to walk to the end of the slips via a cracked cement patio at the rear of the restaurant and not along the edge of the slips themselves, a narrow cement lip overgrown with reeds where an ill-tempered snake might lurk.

The three boys walked to the end of the slips and then walked out onto a six-inch-wide wooden beam that had once separated slip from slip.  The jungly-looking water beneath was so low that it resembled a swamp. I followed them partway out onto the beam and then stopped, not wanting at that moment to experience a bout of vertigo.  One of the boys pointed out a small alligator in the water below.  The alligator watched us intently. There’s another! the boy in the oversized navy-blue shorts shouted, but the noise caused the tiny gator to flick beneath the water.

We tried other beams and the dock itself, but the alligators were quick to vanish.  It wasn’t the right time of day to see them. Alligators feed at dusk and it was only five in the afternoon.  Sweat dripped from my hair and I noticed my t-shirt was soaked, but I stayed on the dock to take pictures of wasp nests.  This was also prime territory for bass, so the boys fished while I took pictures and asked a series of increasingly stupid questions. I stepped back when I noticed one of the younger boys bring back his rod in preparation for the cast.  I’ll just get out of your way, I volunteered, and I moved backwards onto a creaky plank.  Don’t have to, he said, I haven’t hooked anyone yet!

Since the dock proved unsuccessful, one boy volunteered to run back to the pier to see what had happened to the gator we had seen earlier. He took off under the blazing sun, his skin that flushed golden color that once signaled to me a person who had enough money to take a Florida vacation in the dead of a Northeastern winter.  The boy returned in a couple of minutes, still running, to say that the alligator we had seen earlier was now right at the edge of the pier.

All three boys were faster than we were.  They were halfway back to the pier by the time we huffed off the dock, and as we passed by the back of the bar, a window shot open and a man leaned out to yell at Mr B.:  Hey! he shouted, there’s a woman in here who wants you to take a picture of her boobs!  That ended an earlier idea I’d had to grab a beer there.  Mr. B. questioned the existence of the woman at all, and we both agreed that if there were such a woman, then she probably would have flashed Mr. B. on her own.

The alligator at the pier had gone by the time we returned.  The boys turned around and raced back to the boat slips.  It was nearly six, still two hours before the alligators would feed.  We had no spotlight with which to see their eyes, and no stamina to see the setting sun cast the orange glow for which the lake is named. The timing was off.  Mr. B. needed to go home. I was soaked to the skin and dehydrated. We thanked the boys, these local Huck Finns, for their efforts.  A shadow of disapppointment fell over the face of the boy with the oversized navy shorts.  They’re leaving! he said.  Are you coming back tonight?

Mr. B. and I have had a lot of adventures while exploring Florida, but they have been mostly of my own dramatic devise; I am known to turn a leaf-covered trail into a snake pit and a splotch of water into a teeming pool of large-jawed primeval creatures. The Orange Lake Huck Finns demolished my cinematic efforts with the commonplace nature of their routine and I promised that we would be back soon to visit, which is, I do realize, a most unusual but highly rewarding way to spend an afternoon.

BAIT-GAS-ICE: IT’S FISH CAMP FRIDAY!

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nature, South Moon Fish Camp Astor Florida, Travel

Sometimes we find ourselves attracted to things so out of character that we become helpless in their face and can do no more than to follow them like beacons.  This accounts for many seemingly inexplicable romantic pairings,  the purchasing of ugly shoes, and the collecting of navel lint or airline vomit bags.

In my case, I am hopelessly drawn to fish camps.  I’d never heard of fish camps until moving to the South and suddenly I found myself turning down any road that advertised one, the way I used to turn down any road that offered white-peach Bellinis. My first fish camp was Kate’s in Gainesville, and since that time I have blindly followed their signs, probably hoping to run into the type of characters and tales that might result in a creative non-fiction story.  In one case, I followed a fish camp sign down by Orange Lake that led Mr. B. and me into what suddenly seemed like a sketchy situation.  I may have to leave this type of camp to my friend Jack Riepe, simply because Jack of all people would relish the gaminess and know how to cope with the local color better than I would, especially if the local color was fishing in secrecy and without proper permit.

Driving through the Ocala National Forest, I saw not one but three fish camp signs.  South Moon Fish Camp looked to be the most promising (read: downmarket) so I headed there late on a hot afternoon just as the sun was throwing a wash of gold over the St. John’s River.  For those who aren’t familiar with fish camps, they are generally places where you can rent a no-frills accommodation and a boat and have access to cleaning and gutting facilities.  Occasionally they are a bit more upscale and developed, like Parramore’s Fantastic Fish Camp & Family Resort just downwind of South Moon.

There wasn’t anyone around South Moon as we got out of the car and walked to the dock.  I admired a pontoon boat and decided to rent it one day soon; I figure that just as I started “hiking” on concrete parking lots I can start “kayaking” by gliding down the river in a boat that holds 12 but will here transport two.  If we discount my trio of rides on the glass-bottomed boats at Silver Springs, the last time I had been on the water was back in 1991, when my friend Big Pink and I took a turn or two around the Lafayette Reservoir in Lafayette, CA on a two-person paddle boat.

I don’t know what it is about Florida that has me reverting to baby steps. Perhaps it is greater awareness of the environment and perhaps it is something else more deeply seated that is in reality very obvious.  Despite going into my second year here, it is all still strange and unfamiliar, so I am discovering things with a child’s sense of wonder but without a child’s openness to experience.  This has created a lot of stress, if the truth be known.  Given a slightly different set of circumstances, I’d probably be living in a condo in Sarasota and working in a retail boutique, selling designer handbags that claim to be leather but are really vinyl-coated canvas.  And my feet would hurt and I’d hate it and I’d never be up enough on fashion to persuade anyone to spend ten thousand dollars on a purse.  I was this person a couple of decades ago and my feet still have not returned to normal size and neither has any ability to persuade people to do what they really don’t want to do in the first place.

I stood on the dock at South Moon and asked my usual rhetorical question about alligators.  Mullet flashed out of the water and something else briefly made a disturbance and then disappeared below the surface.  I was secretly hoping to run into a grizzled local with beery breath and a big story of the one that got away, but no one materialized.  The camp appeared to have a decent number of boats to rent and I made Mr. B. promise that when we rent a boat, I get to back it out of the dock.

Note: I am unable to find the Web site for the camp, although one of the boats did have a URL printed on its side.  We took a drive around Passamore’s, finding much to like in a couple of the riverside cabins, so they get the link and South Moon does not.  Also in the area is the Jungle Den (we didn’t visit).  Jungle Den has a motel and it formerly had a restaurant.  The link for the restaurant advises that the restaurant is temporarily closed, but that there are many fine restraints (sic) in the area that one might alternatively enjoy. Where is that adult toy shop, anyway?

www.passamores.com
www.blairsjungleden.com

The Blackwater Inn restaurant is just downriver:
www.blackwaterinn.com
From the pictures on their menu, they serve it up plain.

As we drove down Camp South Moon Road, we flushed a group of turkeys out of the grass.  I love wild turkeys and used see many in California. They became so familiar that they used to run up the canyon to sit on the railing of my deck, and they’d wander around my house calling to me.  It was a pleasure to see these birds in Florida.

This sign was at Passamore’s.