This is the first post in this blog, I had another blog on this site several years ago, but in moving it from blogger.com to my personal website and then back again, something went terribly wrong :-) and the blog became inaccessible. Although I can no longer get to the blog itself, I do still have the posts that I made to it and hope to intersperse them in this blog along the way
For this first post, I thought I would talk a little bit about the lake we live on and how we got here. We formerly lived in a nice home centrally located in Tallahassee, Florida, the state capital. My wife's parents were living in Havana when her father passed away, leaving her mother alone some 20 miles from us. My wife wanted to move closer and had always wanted to live on the water, so she asked if we could move. I was against it due to the long commute each day. She found a house for sale on a lake not far from her mother, which I thought was too small for our needs. She asked that if she could sell our house without a realtor and close the deal on the lake house, would I go along with it. Knowing the chances of her being able to do it were next to nil, I smugly agreed. Yea. She did it within a month and here we are, marking 15 years at this location next month :-)
Here are couple of photos of the way the lake looked when we moved in in July of 2000.
Unfortunately, in February of 2013, monsoon-like rains descended on us. The level of the lake is controlled by a spillway which allows excess water to flow down a drain and through a pipe under the dam, out to a creek on the other side of the damn and eventually into the Ocholokonee River. After a dry couple of years, we were all excited to see water levels overlapping the boards on our docs. But it was too much water and it overwhelmed the spillway which resulted in the pipe under the dam busting and parts of the dam washing away. Goodbye water! Goodbye lake! Fishing was phenomenal for a day or so--just get a basket and scoop them up!
We worked long and hard for a year and a half to raise the $100,000.00 it would take to restore the damn and put fish back in the lake, but through the donations of the lake-front home owners and others in the neighborhood who valued access to the lake along with a raffle or two, we did ? The dam was rebuilt and near the end of 2014 water from a stream that flows through it combined with rainfall the lake began to fill up again. Because of the vegetation that had grown up while the lake bed was dry, it will still take some time for the lake to return to what it once was, but it's a start.
That's the saga of our lake; it's not big--a little over 30 acres--but it's a quiet place. No gas-powered motors are allowed. The fishing was once good and we hope it will be again.
