Oklawaha River Report

Thank you for reading this Oklawaha River Report. I wanted to leave Wednesday. Circumstances prevented that. So this report covers only Thursday and Friday.

Subscribers without photos- go to https://www.spottedtail.com/blog/, please.

Paul McInnis met me at the Eureka East ramp Thursday morning. I was talking to a local who suggested we leave our vehicle at the Eureka West ramp instead. We took his advice. From there we loaded almost all of our gear into Paul’s pickup, and drove to Ray Wayside Park. There I discovered I’d left my tent in the van. I had to go back and get it, setting us back an hour. Arrrggghhh.

After loading gear into the kayaks, a short canal put us into the Silver River. I wanted to see otters, got cormorants instead. Once we reached the Oklawaha, we had the river to ourselves, with the brief exception of some canoe racers who came tearing by. The weather was exceptionally nice.

The water was fairly clear. The river flows through bottomland woods- lots of beautiful cypress trees, red maples, ash trees, willows, sabal palms, and other plants I didn’t know. Poison ivy likes it there, a lot! It was all along the banks.

The current was surprisingly swift for a Florida river, and it was much deeper than I expected. The combination of current and depth, combined with plentiful downed trees, made it difficult to fish. If you tried to fish deep, you hung up. If you fished shallow, there weren’t a lot of bites.

spotted sunfish, a.k.a. stumpknocker

Using a tiny jig, Paul did well on the sunfish. My first fish was a bass, on a Culprit worm (red shad), that was all of 10 inches. It was quickly followed by a warmouth. Quite a while later, I got what turned out to be the best fish of the trip, a bass of 2-3 pounds, on the same worm.

After switching to a small fly rod, the bites started coming much more frequently. Of course, the fish were much smaller, too- redbellies, stumpknockers, and bluegills. The fly that produced the best was a black wooly bugger. Of course I lost it to a root. That’s OK, I’ll make more.

redbreast sunfish, a.k.a redbelly

We spent the night at Gores Landing, a small and mercifully quiet campground. The loudest thing there were the birds. Owls hooted all night, limpkins screamed, and at dawn the chorus of songbirds was a wild symphony of bird calls. All especially cool!

bluegill

Day two was largely a repeat of the first, except there were fewer fish. The water was browner, too. By about 1030 we’d stopped fishing and were just paddling, or peddling, in Paul’s case.

We were at Eureka West about 1430, at which point we loaded up, made the shuttle, and went our separate ways homeward.

In all it was a very pleasant if not particularly fish-filled trip.

That’s my Oklawaha River Report. As always, thanks for reading!

Every day is a blessing. Don’t waste it- Go fishing! Go paddling! Go bicycling! Stay active!

John Kumiski
www.johnkumiski.com
www.spottedtail.com
www.spottedtail.com/blog

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