North Central Florida

NORTH CENTRAL FLORIDA November Fishing Report

Winners of “King of the River” tournament. Bill Counts and

Terry Scroggins. Tournament Director, Steven Thames (r) helps by holding fish #5.

An angler looking to visit North Central Florida for bass fishing this month, can expect to find full, nice-looking lakes.  At this writing, the bass fishing has not fully come around, following our September visit from Hurricane Irma, but everyone agrees that the natural lakes—including Newnan’s, Lochloosa, Orange, and Santa Fe–are surely looking good.  I feel it’s a strong bet that we will be enjoying excellent bass action here, by the time our first cool snaps arrive. Until then, local bass fans don’t have to travel far to find great fishing.  Despite the recent flooding, the St. John’s River is putting out some top-notch bassing.  A just-completed event out of Palatka, called the ‘King of the River’ bass tournament, saw almost a third of the field, top the 20-pound mark, on five-bass limits.  The winners (and now, official Kings of the River), BASS Elite Pro Terry Scroggins and Bill Counts, took five 6-pounders to the weigh scales.  Their actual weight was 30.27 pounds.  Of course, it was already well-known that Scroggins and Counts are ‘king material’ as bass anglers.

A short drive south, takes the Gainesville angler to another red-hot bass producer.  Like in many post-storm Florida freshwaters, water in the Harris Chain of Lakes near Leesburg is moving through creeks, runouts, drains, and spillways, and this has drawn in tons of sizable, feeding bigmouths.  Our friends who have fished Griffin, Dora, Eustis, and Harris through late September and early October, have commonly reported catching thirty-plus, nice bass a day.  Back to our nearest lakes that are high and pretty, there are actually a lot of fish being pulled from them.  But the fast-biting fish here are speckled perch.  As boat ramps started re-opening a couple of weeks after Irma, it became quickly evident that all of the new water had not hurt the crappie bite.  Newnan’s and Lochloosa in particular, have put out excellent speck catches fairly steadily for fishers drifting, or slow-trolling crappie jigs out in water 8 to 10 feet deep.

Irma might have roughed us up a bit, but freshwater anglers will long benefit from the new water it left us.