May 3, 2026
Lake Chase, Windermere: The Small Link in a Chain That Drew Champions
A 144-acre lake most boaters pass through on their way somewhere else is one of the smallest links in a chain that drew Shaq, Tiger Woods, and Ken Griffey Jr. to the same shoreline
At 144 acres, Lake Chase is one of the smaller bodies of water in the Butler Chain of Lakes. A boater crossing it from Wauseon Bay toward Pocket Lake covers the whole thing in a few minutes. The mean depth runs to about 21 feet, and the lake holds something on the order of 950 million gallons of clear, sand-bottomed water. By itself, none of that builds a reputation. What built the reputation is what Chase is connected to.
The Butler Chain runs eleven named waters together — Butler, Louise, Isleworth, Down, Little Lake Down, Wauseon Bay, Chase, Pocket, Tibet, Sheen, and Fish Lake — stitched by a system of canals that turned a cluster of separate Orange County lakes into a single navigable network. From a ski boat, the seams between lakes blur. You leave one lake through a cut in the cypress, idle through a canal, and open up onto the next. The chain is what made this stretch of west Orange County a water-skiing country before it was anything else, and it is what made the shoreline some of the most coveted private waterfront in Florida.
Chase sits in the quieter end of that system. It connects through to Lake Down on one side and toward Pocket Lake and Tibet on the other, which means a boat launched on Down can reach Chase without ever loading back onto a trailer. That kind of through-access is the whole reason the chain works as a recreational unit. A skier looking for glass water in the late afternoon has options. If Butler is rough with traffic, Chase or Pocket or Wauseon Bay might be flat. The chain gives you somewhere to go.
That same connectivity is what made the shoreline famous. The Butler Chain became the address of choice for athletes who could live anywhere and chose here — Shaquille O'Neal, Ken Griffey Jr., and Tiger Woods among them, with Isleworth in particular drawing the bulk of the marquee names. The draw was never one lake. It was the system: sand-bottom water clear enough to see down several feet, a chain long enough to run a real boat on, largemouth bass fishing strong enough to hold its own against any lake in central Florida, and the privacy of cypress-lined coves on smaller lakes like Chase where the wake traffic thins out.
The fishing reputation is its own thing. The Windermere chain has been on bass anglers' lists for decades, and the smaller lakes — Chase among them — are part of why. Bass move through the canal cuts. A guide working the chain on a slow morning on Butler can run to Chase or Pocket and find different structure, different cover, fish that haven't seen the same lures all week. The interconnection that serves the skiers serves the anglers too, for the same reason: you are never stuck on one lake.
What Chase offers, specifically, is the quiet end of the experience. It is residential, ringed with private docks, without the open expanse that pulls weekend traffic to Butler or Down. The 21-foot mean depth keeps the water cool through summer. The 144 acres are enough to ski on but small enough that a single fast boat fills the lake. Most days, it doesn't. Most days, Chase is what people on the Butler Chain mean when they talk about why they bought here in the first place — water you can see the bottom of, a shoreline that stays green, and a canal at the end of the cove that opens onto the next lake whenever you feel like going.
The celebrity stories get the headlines, and the bass tournaments get the fishing magazines. Chase gets neither, usually. It is the link in the chain that lets the rest of the chain work — the small lake between the bigger ones, the cut-through, the place a skier ducks into when Butler is busy. The Butler Chain is famous for what happens on it. Lake Chase is part of the reason any of it is possible.
Presented by
Have a waterfront project in Central Florida?
Free waterfront assessment · License #SCC131154313
(863) 934-6218