Fisheating Creek

A 1.5-mile-wide opening in the otherwise continuous 143-mile-long Herbert Hoover Dike allows Fisheating Creek to enter Lake Okeechobee. This, the only unregulated flow into the lake, comprises around ten percent of the water coming into the lake. The creek originates some 40 or 50 miles northwest, somewhere in the prairies, ranches, and groves between Lake Placid and Venus, after which its channel is within the Fisheating Creek Wildlife Management area. It flows past the abandoned and overgrown Cyprus Knee Museum in Palmdale, and past the tourist gator attraction Gatorama, then is bounded on the south by the Highway 27 roadbed and the folded southern flange of the Herbert Hoover Dike. The creek runs into the 1.5-mile-wide pinch between dikes at the Fort Center Archeological Site, a native mound complex used as a fort during the Second Seminole War, then into the lake through a channel under a bridge on Highway 78, south of the town of Lakeport, at the silted up and vegetated west side of the lake.