Lake Okeechobee in September is not a lake so much as a very large, very warm bowl of soup with bass in it. It covers more than seven hundred square miles, averages about nine feet deep, and is ringed with reeds, cattails and lily pads that look identical in every direction once the sun is up. The bite, if you are lucky, lasts from first light until roughly the moment you finish your first coffee.
We launched out of Clewiston in the dark with a local named Ray, who has fished the Big O for forty years and describes every spot on it as "just over there." Over there turned out to be a twenty-minute run through a channel in the grass, past a gator the size of a canoe that watched us go by without much interest, to a pocket in the reeds where Ray killed the motor and whispered that we had about an hour.
The first fish blew up on a hollow frog before the sun cleared the treeline. It was not subtle. The pads shook, the frog disappeared, and the fish went straight into the thickest cover in Florida as if it had an appointment there. Ray told me to reel and not to think about it, which is excellent advice for most things. I got the bass out, five pounds and change, green and gold and furious, and Ray took a photo and said it was a decent start.
Over the next forty minutes we caught eleven more between us, most on the frog, a few on a weightless worm pitched to the reed edges. Egrets stood in the grass nearby and watched every cast like judges at a diving meet. Then the sun climbed, the air went from warm to steam room, and the bite shut off like somebody had flipped a breaker.
We fished until ten out of stubbornness and caught one more bass, which Ray said was the only fish on Okeechobee dumb enough to be up past its bedtime. On the ride back, sunburned and sweating through our shirts, we passed the same gator. It had not moved, which by then seemed like the smartest plan anyone on the lake had come up with.
Ray has already booked us for next September. He says to come earlier.
Long days in the sun call for a hooded sun shirt. See our UPF 50+ fishing shirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.