Lake Jessie, Winter Haven: The 180-Acre Lake Where the World Learns to Land on Water

About 500 pilots a year earn a seaplane rating on Lake Jessie, an oval of water on the northwest side of Winter Haven that covers roughly 180 to 190 acres and averages less than five feet deep. Steve McCaughey, executive director of the Seaplane Pilots Association, told Aviation Week that some 80 schools in the United States can put an Airplane Single-Engine Sea rating in a logbook, and that the school on Lake Jessie's northeast shore graduates more pilots than all of the others combined.

Jack Brown built that school in 1963, on the shore of the lake at the southwestern edge of the Winter Haven airport, to teach pilots to handle a 65-horsepower Piper J-3 Cub on straight floats. He had been flying off water since West Virginia, where he owned a 1939 Aeronca C-3 on Edo floats and operated it from the Kanawha River. During the Second World War he flew Consolidated PBYs in Hawaii as a Navy lieutenant commander. He took over as manager of the Winter Haven airport in 1960 and became its fixed base operator, and the seaplane base went in on Lake Jessie three years later.

The training still begins there. The FAA lists the base as F57, at 140 feet of elevation, with an unmarked north-south water lane of 3,600 by 2,200 feet. The base sits next to Winter Haven's Gilbert Airport and is joined to it by a taxiway; airport property occupies the entire east and northeast shore of the lake, houses line the shoreline from the northwest around to the south end of the west side, and the public ramp is where Morton Road dead-ends at the water. The standard rating course runs about two days: ground school, five hours of dual instruction, and the checkride. Most of the flying happens within about ten miles of that shoreline, in a county that holds more than 600 lakes, most of them usable by a floatplane.