Lake Down, Windermere: The One Public Door Into the Butler Chain

If you want to launch a boat into the Butler Chain of Lakes — any of the thirteen lakes, anywhere on the chain — there is exactly one place you can do it without owning the shoreline or knowing someone who does. It's on Lake Down. A county ramp at the end of Conroy-Windermere Road, tucked between properties whose owners spent the better part of a decade trying to get it moved somewhere else.

That fight ended in July 1988, when Orange County commissioners decided the ramp would stay put. The Orlando Sentinel reported it plainly: the only county boat ramp on the Butler Chain was staying anchored to Lake Down, closing nearly ten years of debate about whether to relocate it away from the residents who opposed it.

Eleven thousand acres of connected water thread through Windermere — Lake Butler, Lake Down, Tibet, Sheen, Pocket, Chase, Louise, Isleworth's frontage, on through Bessie. Some of the most expensive shoreline in Florida wraps around it, in gated communities and private docks, and almost every foot of bank is owned by somebody. Without that one ramp on Lake Down, the chain effectively becomes a private lake system — visible from a few road crossings, accessible only to people whose addresses sit on it.

The ramp drew concentrated opposition for years. Every launch onto the chain goes in over the same gravel apron, and the residents on Lake Down absorbed all of it. The decade of meetings and proposals and counter-proposals leading up to the 1988 decision was an argument over where the one public access point to an eleven-thousand-acre chain would sit. The commission left it where it was, and Orange County has kept a ramp on Lake Down ever since.

The early Windermere boosters understood the lakes as the whole point of the place. A 1911 promotional brochure, quoted years later in a town history compiled by former mayor C. M. Patterson, sold the settlement on its water — "Beautiful Lakes of Pure Spring Water" — and warned northern visitors not to expect the high sloping banks of the lakes they knew up north. The Butler Chain was the lure. Lake Down, Lake Butler, and Lake Bessie were the three named anchors in that pitch.

Bass tournaments launch from the ramp, and the chain turns up in fishing reports and on guide websites rather than only in the listings for the houses around it.

Lake Down ended up holding the door because of where it sits. The chain's navigable canals and natural connections make Lake Down an entry point into nearly the whole system. From that one ramp the whole chain opens up. Launch there and you can run south through the canal toward Wauseon Bay and into Lake Butler, or work your way down through Tibet and Sheen and the lower lakes.