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Low Down on Lake Toho Draw Down
Part 4: Rainy Days & Mondays Always Draw Me Down
By Paul Crawford

February 23, 2004

When April Showers, Come Your Way, The Water Rises, to Our Dismay.

Have you checked out your 10-day forecast lately? Look like a pretty week? A nice weekend? How about those showers next Wednesday? A lot of contractors and project managers in Florida are keeping a very sharp eye on next Wednesday, and the Wednesday after that too. Even in the dry months of Florida, we see a shower or two every week or so. Normally it's just enough to give our lawns a little hope and only rarely lasting long enough to spoil the whole day at the beach. But for those that are working hard on the Toho Draw Down project, just a little rain can reschedule the week and a lot of rain can wash away completion dates.

We checked in this week with Florida Wildlife Commission's Marty Mann who is helping oversee the Toho project out of his Kissimmee office. Marty is defending, worrying, and interpreting his schedules, which is about like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree. His rather thankless task is to reassure homeowners, fish camp operators, and the public in general that all is going along just fine while simultaneously whipping his various contractors into overdrive by citing schedule constraints and worries. He has to keep the confidence of all of those footing the bill that their money is producing the desired results, and coordinate with researches and scientists wanting access to field data. Oh, and he has to answer the occasional interruptions by the curious press, like us. Just in case nobody else says it this week, "Good Job, Marty!"

The day I called on Marty he was busy sorting through the delays and set backs of a rainy day. Anyone who spent much time working at the mercy of the weather knows the frustrations a heavy rain can bring to the job site. But he explained that his worries about the effects of the rain don't end when the clouds break. The culprit once again is the offending muck that everyone is working so hard to get rid of on Toho.

We all know that mix dirt and water and you end up with mud. If you mix muck and water, you get muddy, sticky, sloppy muck where you sink down to you knees trying to take the next step. While a big bulldozer can use its tracks to plow through even this mucky mess, but not so for the wheels of a dump truck. The difference between tracks and wheels turn into scheduling problems when it rains. When it gets too wet to do anything more than mud wrestle, everyone retreats to the maintenance buildings for those rainy day repair jobs. When it quits raining, the bulldozers can return and pile up scraped muck into wind rows and hills. But after the muck is piled up, you need loaders and trucks to cart the stuff off, making room for additional work. For the lake bed to dry out enough to support the weight of the wheeled machinery can take as much as a week.

So we come to our weather forecast. Just how often in the spring to you go a full week with rain? Turns out in Florida, its actually our dry season but even then you don't go much beyond a week between showers. The difference between showers and heavy rain can obviously play havoc with the draw down plans. A light shower may delay things a few hours. A day of light showers can set you back several days while you wait for the ground to dry. A day of heavy rains can raise the lake several inches and that is a BIG deal in flat Florida. I remind you these are not your rocky reservoirs but low, flat swamp land where two inches of water may move the lake edge back 100 yards. Now you have to drain that couple of inches back out and then wait for the ground to dry and two or three days can become two or three weeks. These are the nightmare scenarios of planners and managers. Fortunately, other than a few days of light rain, Mother Nature has been rather kind at least so far.

Rains normally only cause reschedules and reduced efficiency. On the days where the mucky edges of the lake are too wet to haul, you can just work on the "hillside" of things and get your work done closer to the old lake shore. The only trouble with this strategy is if it continues to rain, you get into a situation where the entire hillside is done and the deeper lakeside is the only thing left to do. Now FWC did plan for even this and has permits to build a series of hills to be left in place after the draw down, but these are limited in number, limited in where they can be located, and should be left to complete efforts, not be used up as a stop gap measure. The spoil hills therefore don't really make up for delays, they just provide a temporary buffer for a couple of extra days work on the dozers. Even if the spoil hills are only a short term tool, managers can use all of the tools they can get their hands on, because the clock continues to tick and there is a lot of work to be done.

When we were getting ready for the draw down, they estimated 7 million yards of muck would be removed from 3800 acres of exposed bottom. Well, close. Turns out once things were exposed; it was more like 9 million yards instead. Clearly this was not a job for some guy with a shovel and a pick up truck. Bids were let, bonds were posted, and dates were set. As of this writing, work is active in 7 of the 11 areas identified for work. The other 4 areas are committed to start this week, but even under the worse case, (a start date default causing another contractor to be chosen), it will all be underway this month. With all of the areas being worked simultaneously, Marty remains very optimistic that all of the work will be competed before the real raining season ends the festivities.

Even if Mother Nature decides to demonstrate her sense of humor and rewards the orange growers with a wet spring, all will not be lost. Nobody really wants to think about using them, but recovery plans have been put in place. Remember that hillside/lakeside thing? What that should tell you is if the lakes fills up early, the high payoff shallows will all ready be completed and the only thing overcome by events would be the fringe or edge vegetation and associated muck that would be in the deepest areas. Add up rising water, dying vegetation, and a muck bottom, any Florida fisherman will tell you that equates into mud tussocks. For those of you that haven't seen these things, they are little floating islands of life and decaying debris that blow around randomly on a lot of Florida lakes. Mud Tussocks can range in size from a couple of feet to a couple of acres and can last from a couple of weeks to several years. Rather than let these things float up and spoil our newly scraped bottom, contingency plans have been made to mechanically harvest any mud tussocks that are found floating later this year. It's a rather expensive endeavor and not one managers would like to use, but it's available if needed.

Speaking of schedules, we are overcoming a slight delay in our hydrilla control program. The control program was targeted to start February 15th but didn't get started until the first week of March. Also keeping a wary eye on the rain gauge, the treatment will continue as the concentrations are increased and targeted areas treated. When you're treating a whole lake, it's not like you can just drop a couple of tablets in one end and go away, it takes 4 to 6 weeks to treat all of the water and then you have to keep it at that concentration for 60 to 90 days. If you start in March, take until mid April to get fully treated, then my calendar shows you're starting to bump up against the "normal" rainy season that starts about the end of June. Helping hydrilla managers out has been a few cold fronts bringing water temperatures down into the 50s, applying a little natural hydrilla control in the process. I was marveling at what a good job lake managers were doing on the hydrilla just a couple of weeks ago, so Mother Nature has been lending a helping hand.

While the weeds go out, the plants come in. With 3800 acres of clean, clear bottom, it won't take long before we see native plants, likely along with some new weeds, starting to spring up in the spawning flats. As bass fishermen, we all know that bass prefer a little cover on the spawning flats to build their beds next to. To give the bass, and their forage, a little head start on a nice bedding spot about 200 acres are being plugged with new plants to speed up the recovery. Not only will the new cover give the bass someplace to spawn, but it will be a needed safe haven for the forage to regenerate as well.

If history is any judge, next years spawn will be rated between spectacular and unbelievable for predators and prey alike. The one thing Toho has always had going for it is that it's a very fertile lake and can sustain a large biomass. One of the favorite meals for these fish is threadfin shad, and it's going to continue to be quite a feast. With the reduced lake volume and the receding hydrilla cover, it's been party time out there for the last few months. The fish look like little swimming footballs just stuffed with shad and as healthy as can be. This sets the stage for a race between the shad population and the spring rains. The question is will the shad hold out until the water rises? Under any "normal" rain patterns, the answer is going to be "Yes." With the rising waters, the bass will have plenty of new meals in the shallows and the remaining shad will scatter along with the bass into the flooded cover. The great follow up spawns for the shad will recharge the food supply since it only takes a single year for threadfin to grow to maturity. This will give a gigantic food supply for the newly spawned bass as they will only be fingerlings when they get started on their weight gain program. Everything is setting up to put the entire food chain in overdrive and promise many future years of great fishing.

While we're typing about fishing, a quick report from the water. The huge food supply and the monumental flocks of birds that have been attracted to the lake are keeping the schooling down right now. Even among the overloaded forage and stuffed fish, the fishing is great and getting better. I've been working a pattern in the remaining hydrilla of floating along with the wind, casting to the thin spots with Senkos, Kut Tails, and swimming grubs. A "fair" day is 25 fish up to 4 or 5 pounds. The big girls are being taken by the guides with shiners with constant reports of double digit fish and delighted customers. The crappie fishermen are having a ball in the few remaining deep holes. These are the same areas where the bass will be moving as the hydrilla treatment takes hold.

The two main entrances to the lake continue to be Richardson's Fish Camp in the northern middle section of the lake and locking through from Lake Cypress. Osceola County is scheduled to do some work on the Southport Ramp and that should open up yet another gateway soon.

A tip for those considering a visit is your prime tourist availability is here within a week or two which will correspond to the spring bass boom nicely. Daytona and Bike Week are in the books, the snow birds have started their northern migration, so all we have is Spring Break left for the hard core tourist season. That will leave a nice gap during prime time top water season between the winter season and the summer school breaks at the end of May. All of the attractions and hotels will go to off season rates about the first of April making a Florida Fishing Vacation more affordable and pleasant, assuming you can get a second mortgage for the gas to drive down here.

Well, I promised myself I'd go and do a little "research" for the next fishing report. So until then, travel safe and you're welcome to come share our spring misery. Oh, the water temperature is 72 today.

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