Lake George at Silver Glen Springs

I've lived in Florida for 22 years and had never seen Lake George (second in size only to Lake Okeechobee, which I have also never seen). So thanks to a little extra weekend driving time, I am no longer a Lake George virgin. It was an experience as big as its size. I write this a spent man, burned and exhausted.

The far shore on Lae George is so distant that to these aging eyes it might well have been the water horizon itself. In fact, everything about Lake George seems a mix of salt water and fresh water: the sandy bottom, the abundant palms on shore, the chop. The water itself is surprisingly clear, with visibility up to three feet or so, and made for a show the whole way. Occasionally, beside me I would see a large disturbance in the water and would look over, hoping to see what gators do when they are trying to get away, but I saw nothing but the churned up bottom.

It took a half mile's paddle past a flotilla of yachts and leather-skinned dowagers to actually get from the springs to the lake. The springs is the clearest water I've ever put my boat in, schools of mullet streaming past underneath, many of them jumping two feet out of the water. Finding where the lake proper begins is obvious, as the water goes from glass smooth to choppy immediately.

I found myself haunted the whole time by descriptions of two of the areas great chroniclers William Bartram and Majorie Kinnan Rawlings (the setting for The Yearling is right where I put in.) Minus the McMansion boats and buoys, Lake George remains exactly as they described it. Bartram especially waxed poetic about his desire to stay and continue to discover this bounty, and I confess I felt the same. I wanted to spend however long it took to investigate every inch of this shoreline, no small task on a lake 12 miles long and 6 miles wide.

The caterpillars have claimed a good piece of the shoreline I did visit, as many of the trees were completely sprayed in webbing. As I recall from my childhood, this does not kill the trees, but something looked out of kilter about it. Perhaps the caterpillar/butterfly has lost a natural predator?


I will come back here, that is for certain, but it will need to be for days, not hours. At the National Park store in Salt Springs, I bought a detailed map of the Ocala National Forest and the paddling options are so numerous that I lost count. It is also one of the few places left in Florida where one can legitimately get lost in the wilderness. Oh, what a joy that would be. Seriously.