Fish Story
- Jim Crescitelli
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
The first time I remember going fishing was when my dad brought me down to the pedestrian path along Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. This was years before the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964 to straddle the waters linking the Lower Bay to the Upper Bay.
Dad would bring along two bamboo fishing poles fitted with string- no reel- and a few slices of baloney for bait. Yes; baloney, or "bologna" as the local Italians referred to it.
I don't recall ever having caught a fish. What I do recall is the endless waiting, and the constant entreaties from Dad to "stop scaring the fish with your talking." I did have a lot of questions:
Why are we here?
Why is this taking so long?
Do we have to eat the fish we catch?
We can just get fish cakes from Ann's delicatessen up the block, right?
The next time I fished was during a trip to Florida in 1970- my first visit to the Sunshine State. I served as a youthful appendage (I was fourteen, and still had a lot of questions) to a young uncle and aunt who drove the three of us to Sarasota from Brooklyn so that they could look at the area prior to a possible move. That was a secret, I think; if Uncle John and Aunt Joanne had voiced out loud to my Italian family that they were considering a move from Brooklyn, there would have been trouble; it was already enough that he had married a woman of Polish-Swedish ancestry.
In Sarasota I was made to go fishing with them and a friend of Uncle John named Fred; they'd served together at Udon Thani in Thailand during the Vietnam War. That first day among the waves was great: I learned to bait a hook with tiny, lifeless shrimp and, though I don't recall catching anything, it was kind of fun. The second day out on the bay was altogether different: the bait moved around a LOT more, and I had trouble keeping it from wriggling away while attempting to impale the living creatures onto my hook. But the huge sailfish I caught made it all worthwhile. (Kidding.)
I didn't think of fishing again until I moved to Central Florida in 1978. After availing myself of Winter Park, Orlando, and the amusement parks, I set my sights westward and, in my clunky beige Plymouth Volare, headed toward undiscovered locations mapped in my road atlas: Ocoee... Winter Garden... Tildenville... Oakland... Killarney... Harlem Heights... What WAS this quiet landscape that lacked roller coasters, talking chipmunks, turkey legs for lunch, and traffic?
I encountered a green and orange landscape, and there was a lake. Actually, a LAKE, the fourth-largest in Florida as it turned out. World renowned for its fishing and recreation, it spawned hotels and businesses in Winter Garden and beyond.
Though it appeared in my atlas, I wasn't particularly looking for it but encountered Lake Apopka by accident when I took a turn and drove north along Tubb Street through the dead calm of Oakland. I had to stop at a sandy mound that sloped gently through tangled foliage to a small dock. And there was this LAKE. If Oakland was quiet, you can imagine how still it was at the water's edge. And what I recall was a soft green haze that wafted above the water, thick enough further out so that you couldn't see any distant shores. Apparently, I later learned, this was due to spores from the algae growth suffocating the once-vibrant waters, a bad state of affairs brought about by chemicals used in various agricultural enterprises on its north shore... and sewage from the south.
What the heck? What happened?
Speed forward to 2012 when I started working at the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation, and the full story of mighty Lake Apopka was revealed to me. What had once been the state's third-largest lake was made smaller when 21,000 acres along the shores were drained and planted with vegetables to supply troops during World War II. The aforementioned chemicals, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, washed back into the lake after water irrigating the fields was pumped back.
By the 1960s, Lake Apopka was a shadow of its famous former self. Two dozen fishing camps disappeared, and the water became so polluted that only trash fish and choking algae could survive. And the sport fishing industry was decimated: a heartbreaking chapter for what was once considered the "large mouth bass capital of the world."
The story has an upturn. An organization known as Friends of Lake Apopka, spearheaded by the late, great advocate Jim Thomas, debuted in 1991 and succeeded in having farms around the lake purchased by various governing agencies, and then closed; and sewage plants, a chemical fertilizer factory, and citrus processing packinghouses eventually closed and stopped pumping waste into the water. The Saint John's River Wildlife Management District has been advocating to restore much of the region's natural state for decades: You can now enjoy the perimeter of the lake in its entirety- here's a map:
There is hope. You can definitely see improvement, in that you can spot distant shores again. Kayak tours take place, and scores of baby bass and catfish are occasionally put into the lake to breed and thrive. Ecotourism is a term voiced aloud, something that would have seemed impossible forty years ago.
Don't simply write off the lake as a loss. It's a living thing, a battery that has sustained life along its perimeter for thousands of years. Make the Wildlife Drive- carefully and sensibly- and join Friends of Lake Apopka.
For our part, the Winter Garden Heritage Foundation will be presenting a multimedia exhibit on the history and importance of West Orange County's waterways. Look for it in early 2026. Help us advocate for Lake Apopka and all our waters to sustain their healthy future. We also preserve all the FOLA documents in our Archive, so make it a mission to learn more about the lake in our backyard.
Maybe someday I'll be standing on the dock at Winter Garden's Newton Park, happily baiting my hook with baloney.
