Lake Leonida

A massive shallow freshwater lake in the Grassrivers interior, famous for its largemouth bass, its airboat traffic, and the things occasionally found floating in it.

Lake Leonida is an enormous, shallow, slow-moving sheet of water filling the interior basin of Grassrivers — technically a lake but more like a very large, very old puddle that evolution decided to populate with alligators and bass. The fishing economy here is legitimate and globally respected: professional bass tours make annual stops at Lake Leonida, and the world-record largemouth was pulled out of a particular cove in 1987 under circumstances that remain murky. The shoreline is a ring of fish camps, stilt houses, airboat operators, and bait stands, most of them run by families who've worked this water for three generations. The lake has also developed a reputation, over the decades, for being an unusually good place to lose things — cars driven off boat ramps, light aircraft that never filed a flight plan, and more than a few missing persons whose last known locations were a dock on the east side at sunset.