State begins stocking Lake Apopka with one million largemouth bass

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The process to stock Lake Apopka with one million largemouth bass began Wednesday, November 30, as officials from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) put 35,000 bass in the state’s third-largest lake.

The two-inch fingerlings will be introduced to the lake at various points over the next two to three weeks until all one million are in the 30,000-acre lake that straddles the Orange-Lake county line to the southwest of downtown Apopka.

“A lot of Lake Apopka still has bad habitat that needs to be restored, but in isolated areas of the lake there is actually quality habitat and phenomenal-sized bass. However, they are in a much lower number and that’s why we’re stocking it,” said Brandon Thompson, a fisheries research biologist with FWC.

Thompson said Lake Apopka has plenty of forage for the fish and it should take two to three years to get large enough so that anglers will want to keep their catch.
The current bass population isn’t large in numbers, but many of them are trophy size.

The two-inch fish are about a month old and were hatched at the FWC’s Richloam Fish Hatchery in the Webster area west of Groveland and Clermont in Lake County.
The fingerlings are genetically pure Florida largemouth bass and tend to grow bigger than largemouth bass species found in other parts of the country, officials said.

Apopka Mayor Joe Kilsheimer said the stocking of bass into Lake Apopka should mean good things for the city.

“Lake Apopka is in the middle of a world-class comeback story,” he said. “Restoring the lake and the population of large-mouth bass has good potential to attract sport fishing, tournaments and visitors to this area – all that will boost ecotourism for the city of Apopka.”

Read more about this story in the December 2 issue of The Apopka Chief, and check out a video of this event on the newspaper’s Facebook page.