My story on Moores's Pond
As told by Morris Mixson
December 4, 2008

The slough coming out of Moore's Pond flows to Ledwith Lake. It is kind of a NW direction to me. Now, I don't know...I've made the trip in a canoe when it was high water. We used to go there, like James says, during the high water. Especially during hurricanes and any other time they had lots of rain. (The fish were) so plentiful that you could, like you say, dip them up with nets or anything else right out of there where the culvert goes under the road there and you could hear the fish...just dip 'em up... The game warden heard about this and so he came by and told everybody he was going to have to arrest anybody for...if they were using a net to dip up the fish 'cause that was illegal in Florida. (And probably anywhere else in fresh water fish). And, so, we decided we'd just get us a 3 gang hook and just drop it in there and you'd come up with a fish every time you threw your hook in. Well, later on he came back and said this was illegal...you had to have a bait on it and you couldn't use but one hook, you couldn't use a 3 gang hook. So, this stopped that for a while. Well, that's the story on the flooded slough.

But, I used to go through the woods back there with my dad and my mother too, and we went down to Moore's Pond and it was covered with hyacinths. But they had little narrow channels out through the hyacinths. And, we liked to go down there and fish with a spinner. Now, a spinner is about a 3 foot line on the end of a pole with a spinner with a 3 gang hook with feathers on it and you'd work this back in a figure 8 in front of the boat and up beside the hyacinths. Well, when you caught a fish, especially a trout or bass as they call 'em...a good sized one...you had to bring the pole straight back. You couldn't lift it up. A big bass would not let you...you couldn't lift him with the pole. We caught, you know, some 7-8 pound bass this way.

Rosalie (Morris's mother) with 10 lb bass that Wilbur caught

And, I can remember Mama. She would just catch a big bass like that and just hhhooollleeerrr...ooohhhh it was great! And, also, one of the things that we did, we liked to go on a cloudy day or either a drizzly rainy day in those channels in through the hyacinths.

These...this was the best time to use a spinner...and it was a wonderful way of catching fish.  And, that's my Moore's Pond story.

Moore's Pond and surrounding Mixson homesteads