Small lake bass fishing in Florida offers a lot of promise. Picking the right lake is key.
Reno Alley wheeled us into a small boat ramp off a side street in Haines City and we quickly launched his 18-foot bass rig. Sixty seconds later, we made our first cast. We weren’t more than a modest rifle shot from the ramp and never needed to put the boat on plane to get there. Within minutes we boated a fat 3-pound bass, and that was the start of a steady parade of fish. By the time an early afternoon thunderstorm ended our day, we had tallied over 20 bass. The best was pushing 7 pounds.
I doubt if we burned a quart of gas. Most of the time, the trolling motor provided all the propulsion we needed on the 450-acre lake.
Big lakes garner a lot of publicity, but the dozen best-known big lakes in Florida are dwarfed by the 7,000 named lakes, rivers and ponds that share the peninsula with them. That’s a lot of fishing water that a lot of anglers ignore, and many are easy to access. Polk County, for example, has over 500 small lakes in the 200- to 500-acre range, and most have excellent county-maintained ramps. The same situation occurs in many other areas of the state. In a lot of cases, you can pull your boat up to the ramp on a Saturday morning and have little, if any, company. Alley, who operates Memory Makin’ Guide Service from his home in Frostproof, likes that.
The Small Lake Advantage
“Big lakes have a lot of water,” says Alley, who has been guiding and fishing tournaments in central Florida for over 22 years, “but they also get a lot of pressure. Some have a tournament on them virtually every weekend, and those anglers who fish those tournaments spend a lot of non-tournament time on the lake to keep up with the fish. The result is that the bass are looking at a lure darn near every day of the week.”
With high usage also comes congested ramps, limited parking and a lot of boats vying for the best spots. But, just a few miles away there could be a small lake that may not have seen an angler in weeks.
“First thing I do on any small lake I’m considering is to just idle around the lake and look,” explains Alley. “If I see a lot of docks with a lot of boats, I can figure that the lake gets pounded pretty regularly. This is especially true if there is an RV park or mobile home park on the lake. That indicates retirees, who spend a lot of time fishing. I won’t waste time on lakes like this because there are plenty of others that get little pressure that I can look at.”
Once a lake passes that basic test, Alley will get down to finding bass. Given the smaller waters, that’s not that difficult to do because prime cover is not abundant. Locate the key areas and you can expect to find fish there on subsequent trips.
The key areas depend upon the type of small lake you are fishing. There are two basic types in Florida: drainage lakes and sinkhole lakes. Each presents a different habitat and the…
