I have had bad days, this wasn’t one of them.
Bob and Sun picked up some new kayaks at Wildware yesterday, and today we took them up to Opossum Lake to make sure they were sea worthy. Boy were they! We had a great time.
When we found the place (I hadn’t been there in years) I noticed that the water was REALLY low. After almost a complete circumnavigation of the lake I could see the water line was 10 to 15 feet lower than normal. This cut off a lot of the little coves and nooks that were always fun to explore up, and made paddling the length of the lake a pretty easy task.
While Sun and Bob were enjoying a good float, I decided to pop out for a bit and take a walk along a bunch of the shore line. I asked a fisher person why the lake was so low, and he said there was trouble with the dam. He also mentioned that “they” were trying to get together money to fix it but they didn’t know when that would be.
The Sentinel had an article from 2005 that hints at the problems. At least reading that you get the idea. The spillway was allowing seepage through, and the damn is only rated for 15 inches of rain in 24 hours (apparently the fed requires it be rated for 25″). Also it mentions that there would be a lot of damage if the damn fails. They have drained the lake down to below the spillway, and are (or were in that article) trying to see how much work it will take to rectify the situation.
It’s a shame, I was looking at some pics on line of Opossum Lake and it was much nicer when it had water in it.