September 8, 2026
Lake Smart, Winter Haven: The Round Lake on the Ten-Lake Run
Lake Smart sits on a chain that crosses three cities and ten lakes, stitched together by canals that turned a scattering of round Polk County ponds into a single navigable system
Pull out of the half-moon cove on the northwest side of Lake Smart, find the cut, and you can run canals to Lake Fannie, on past Conine and Echo and Rochelle, and keep going until you have crossed into Lake Alfred and Lake Hamilton without trailering once. Without that cove there is no way off the lake by water. Smart is a round natural lake of 277 acres and one of the ten lakes on that run, the Northern Chain.
Most people who know Winter Haven know the Southern Chain — Eloise, the old Cypress Gardens water-ski stage, the Chain of Lakes Park ramp where bass boats line up on tournament mornings. There are two chains here. The northern one links Haines, Rochelle, Echo, Conine, Fannie and Smart before running on through the waters at Lake Alfred and Lake Hamilton. The channels between those lakes were dug. Before them, Smart was a closed basin with its own shoreline.
The shape of the lake explains why a channel was needed in the first place. The lakes on this chain are mostly round or near-round, sitting in karst country where Florida's limestone has dissolved into shallow basins over thousands of years. A basin like that has no outlet to the next basin. A dug cut between two of them is the whole connection.
The northwest cove faces the rest of the chain, and the cut sits there. The remainder of the shoreline is woods and citrus grove rows along the eastern and southern arcs, not the built-out waterfront of the Southern Chain lakes.
The Northern Chain is a transit run. A bass fisherman launching at one ramp can work six lakes before lunch, and a pontoon leaving a backyard dock on Smart can reach Lake Haines by water. Boats cross a city line partway through the run.
On Smart's north shore, the Villas at Lake Smart opened in 2004, a 220-unit affordable housing complex developed by the Carlisle Group for teachers, seasonal workers, police officers and firefighters priced out of Winter Haven's lake-adjacent housing. The 220 units sit on chain-lake frontage. Tom Freijo, a Carlisle Group consultant and former Winter Haven city commissioner, spoke to The Ledger when the project was completed.
Peace River, Fort Meade: The Thirteen Miles Where the River Drains Into the Ground
Between Bartow and Fort Meade the Peace River loses water into holes in its own bed — on one day in June 2002 the USGS measured about 32 million gallons going into the ground — and Fort Meade is where the leaking stops
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Lake Hancock Is Held a Foot and a Half Higher for the Peace River
The 1963 weir let Lake Hancock spill over its top at 98.7 feet; the structure that replaced it in 2013 holds the lake to 100, and the extra foot and a half is stored for a river between Bartow and Zolfo Springs
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The Legal Floor Under Lake Wailes Has Never Been Met, and the District Proposes Lowering It to 102.1 Feet
Lake Wailes has not met the minimum level the water district set for it in 2015, and the draft reevaluation going to the Governing Board on October 27 would replace 104.8 feet with 102.1
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Lake Walk-in-the-Water, Lake Wales: The Lake That Lost All Its Hydrilla and Had to Be Replanted
Three 2004 hurricanes pulled every bit of submersed vegetation out of Lake Walk-in-the-Water and no one ever sprayed a drop — by FWC's account the hydrilla has not come back, and biologists have spent the years since hand-planting natives in its place
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