Flows and Water Management

Here is an Editorial of my own about what I think of the Water Management by Florida Power and Light.

Middle Dam on Richardson Lake

Mid-way between Dam and Pond In The River

After fishing the Rapid River for 13 years or more I have seen two companies manage the water resource of this river system.  When I first started fishing the Rapid in 1994 the water was controlled by Union Water, part of CMP.  The flows then in the spring were almost always at least 600cfs and most of the time 800cfs.  Bass in the river did not seem to exist until FPL took over the management of the river.  It seemed to me that FPL was always bent on getting Richardson Lake full as soon as they could, hense they would have prolonged 400cfs or lower flows in the spring.  Then the Bass problem seemed to appear.  From what I have been told the Bass have been in that system for a long time but never made it to the upper parts of the Rapid River until these very low flows in the spring.  

This shows a flow of 400 CFS - Just before entering PitR

My feeling is that management of the water resource of the Rapid River needs to be looked at.  Just because the minimum flow set by regulation is 400cfs does not mean that that is the rate they need to flow in the spring.  I also say they need to work with a cusion in Richardson lake so they can flow more reasonable rates of 700 to 800cfs and not do the rapid increases and decreases they do now.  1 to 2 foot cusion in Richardson Lake would work well and allow more uniform flows in the river.  This would help to keep the Bass out and also improve the fishing in the Rapid River.

I would really like to hear others thinking on this by posting a comment to this story.

Lee

by LeeGoldsmith

After my service time (4 years active) I went to collage and obtained a Masters degree in Forestry from UNH but never really worked as a forester other then to process data from other foresters using a program to calculate volume of standing timber. From there I became a self taught programmer in FORTRAN and have worked as a programmer for a manufacturing company then got into tech support now working as a test engineer for a small company that does contract work for Hewlett Packard. Lee's Fishing Page has grown from a simple site hosted by my internet provider to being hosted now by TotalChoiceHosting and being built with Geeklog and its many plugins. LFP is now on glFusion and I believe will be for the rest of time. I hope everyone likes the site and will contribute to it.