MONTVERDE, Fla. – While a pontoon boat was cruising along the southwest shore of Lake Apopka earlier this month, an alligator swimming alongside it suddenly dove underwater and took off at a high rate of speed, creating a large wake on the surface as it streaked in front of the bow.
“I have never seen one move that fast!” exclaimed Joe Dunn, the executive director of Friends of Lake Apopka.
“That was wild,” said Wes Parrish, a member of the citizen advocacy group’s board. “I’ve never seen that behavior.”
Dunn and Parrish invited News 6 on a boat tour of Lake Apopka, which butts up to Montverde and other communities in Lake and Orange counties, to show how the body of water is rebounding from decades of contamination caused primarily by farms that once lined the lake’s northern shore.
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“Every time we go out and talk to people, it always surprises them that the lake is what it is today,” said Parrish. “They still have this stigma in their mind that it is this a terribly polluted, dead lake.”
Instead, colorful birds build nests and hunt for food in the native vegetation that’s being restored along the shoreline while Lake Apopka’s once-famous largemouth bass population continues to make a comeback.
“During the 20′s, 30′s, and 40′s this was the best bass fishing lake in the eastern United States,” said Dunn. “People from all over came here to fish in the clear waters of Lake Apopka with a sandy bottom (including) Clark Gable and Al Capone.”
Problems on the lake first began in the 1890s, according to Dunn, long before the dozens of fish camps that once lined the shores of Lake Apopka began shuttering due to declining bass numbers.
That’s when a seven-mile canal was excavated to connect Lake Apopka to the Harris Chain of Lakes, causing the water level to drop.
“They dug the Apopka-Beauclair Canal to get citrus from here up to the Ocklawaha River, the St. Johns River, Jacksonville and then up the east coast,” said Dunn. “The entire 50,000-acre lake went down three feet.”
Newly-exposed land on the lake’s north shore was put to use during World War II to grow vegetables.
Dunn said pesticides and fertilizers containing phosphates originating from those cabbage and corn farms spilled into Lake Apopka, triggering sunlight-blocking algae blooms that killed aquatic plants needed by most game fish to survive.
The problem was exacerbated by effluent from nearby citrus processing plants and municipal wastewater facilities being disposed of in Lake Apopka.
“They thought, ‘It’s a big ole lake. It’ll dissipate and won’t hurt anybody,’” said Dunn.
But by the mid-1980s, the last of Lake Apopka’s fish camps closed as the once crystal-clear water had turned pea green and the sandy lake bottom was covered in a thick “muck” of dead vegetation.
Central Florida biologist Jim Thomas established Friends of Lake Apopka in 1991, in part to encourage farmers to voluntarily limit the amount of fertilizer and pesticides flowing into the lake.
When those efforts failed, Dunn said the organization successfully pressured state leaders to buy up farmland on Lake Apopka’s north shore and invest in a major clean-up operation.
In 1998, the state completed the $100 million purchase of 15,000 acres of agricultural land and began flooding the former marshes.
Since then, multiple government agencies have taken measures to improve Lake Apopka’s water quality while restoring native vegetation that had been killed off over the past century.
Among the most significant actions has been the construction of the Lake Apopka Marsh Flow-Way, a series of ponds and marshes that naturally filter phosphorous and other contaminants out of the water as it flows through native vegetation. The clean water is then routed back to Lake Apopka using electric pumps.
“They call it an ‘artificial kidney’ because it takes the toxins out,” said Dunn. “Every 18 months the entire 54 billion gallons of this lake goes through that process. It’s all-natural. No chemicals. It’s just water slowly filtering the phosphorous out.”
Additional phosphorus is removed from the lake through the regular harvesting of gizzard shad, a native fish that feeds on algae and keeps the water green by churning up muck on the lake bottom.
As a result of those clean-up efforts, phosphorus concentrations in Lake Apopka have declined 69% since the late 1980s while water clarity has increased 93%, according to the St. Johns Water Management District.
Friends of Lake Apopka has been raising community awareness about the lake’s problems and potential solutions, but Dunn credits state leaders for taking action to reverse the damage.
“We’re just the cheerleaders,” said Dunn. “The St. Johns Water Management District does the heavy lifting. (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) does really good work. Our legislative delegation supports them and gets the funding. So the way people can help is by supporting those organizations.”
Although Lake Apopka has significantly improved over the past three decades, Dunn said the lake continually faces threats.
Most recently, the invasive aquatic plant hydrilla threatened to cover much of the lake’s surface, blocking out sunlight needed by native plant and animal species.
Hydrilla typically covers about 500 acres of Lake Apopka, said Dunn. Due to what he described as inadequate state funding to control the invasive plant, hydrilla had taken over about 18,000 acres of the lake by 2019.
“We were screaming at the top of our lungs saying this is crazy,” Dunn told News 6. “There was an existential threat to Lake Apopka.”
State legislators eventually approved $7 million to attack the hydrilla with an herbicide that was applied by helicopter this past winter and spring, said Dunn, successfully bringing the invasive plant back under control.
“We keep saying, ‘You don’t declare victory and go home and just pop the champagne’,” Dunn said. “You knocked it back to 500 aces. But if next fall it grows to 1,000 acres, you’ve got to fix it. And it will only cost $100,000. Not $7 million. That’s the math Tallahassee understood.”
Assuming Lake Apopka’s water quality continues to improve, Dunn believes efforts will eventually be made to dredge the thick muck covering the bottom and expose the original sand that helped make the lake sparkle nearly a century ago.
But Dunn predicts such a project will be dauntingly expensive.
“You probably can’t get that kind of money at a state level. It’s probably going to be at a federal level. And how do you get the federal level excited about Florida’s fourth-largest lake?” asked Dunn. “You’ve got to have patience and tenacity. You just keep pushing and pushing. And if people bond together and raise their voices and say, ‘This is important to us’.”
As Parrish steered the boat back to the dock, he expressed optimism that Lake Apopka would someday return to its former glory.
“I think the future is bright,” he said. “I’m 70 years old, so I’m not going to see that beautiful clear glass [water]. But my granddaughter might.”
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