The Lake Sarasota Community Blog

Here's Ray's report about Sunday's Lakeview Park clean-up, which involved folks from Lake Sarasota and from the Sarasota Sky Pilots. A major thank-you to all who came out to help: We had a good turn out at the park yesterday.... I think there were 9 or 10 residents signed in on Kim's sign in sheet before Sky Pilots started showing up. Kim left the sign in sheets with Franklin if you want a complete list of people that attended. Got a lot of stuff pulled from the canal. Sky Pilots did mostly trimming of trees hanging in the way of the disc throwing on each of the holes. We completely filled the dumpster & had enough stuff laying by the fence and along the sides of the canal to fill the dumpster two more times. Caution: water moccasins and gators: There are water moccasins in the canal! I seen for the first time as I was picking up some branches from the canal's edge a moccasin shot out from under and swam into the canal. I saw it swimming a few minutes later ...

The canals are beginning to look cleaner in Lakeview Park. Compare the weed-choked images of a few weeks ago with today, and you see much less duckweed and algae, water that at times allows you a view down to the bottom, and - a nice plus - plenty of ripples and leaps from fish, frogs, turtles and other living creatures (including a gator, see below) that seem to be enjoying the slightly deeper, and more oxygen-rich, waters. The canals are being fed from the lake via the pump, which was turned on a couple of weeks ago after a meeting at the pump site that included a representative of the county along with folks from Lake Sarasota, Bent Tree, and the Sarasota Sky Pilots Disc Golf Club. For the water to circulate properly, a berm had to be constructed to move the incoming water through the park's canal system and back out through the culvert (the large pipe) to the lake. That job, using giant rocks from the landfill, took county worker Pete Sauchinitz three days, working by himself...

Several people have recently reported seeing an alligator going from Lake Sarasota into the canals of Lakeview Park. Tonight around 6:30 p.m. a four-foot alligator was spotted in one of the ponds in the park. It was sitting in the water, near the edge, and appeared to have a dead possum in its mouth. People familiar with the park - including a few disc golfers - say they've seen this gator come and go for several months. About four months ago it - or another like it - was seen sunning itself near the seventh tee. The gator's presence is therefore most likely due to the natural return of water to the canals thanks to rainfall. Three or four alligators are understood to regularly circulate between the waters of Bent Tree and the lake and park. It only makes sense to be wary. Dogs should be on leashes in the park, kids should stay out of the canals, golfers may need to accept the watery fate of discs that have gone astray.