Lone Cabbage Fish Camp

by AnnaJo Vahle

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Dimensions

36.000 x 24.000 x 0.750 inches

Title

Lone Cabbage Fish Camp

Artist

AnnaJo Vahle

Medium

Painting - Acrylic On Canvas

Description

This is the real Florida. But though the long gray dock still offers a glimpse of real Florida, the 70-year-old Lone Cabbage is no longer a "real" fish camp.
In fact, many of the 160 or so such camps that used to dot the state's waterways in the 1960s are gone. Real fish camps have cheap cabins for rent. They have boat slips and bait-and-tackle shops. People find out about them through word of mouth.
I painted this from the backside of the Fish Camp. You can see a couple of airboats docked by the deck. Three turtles have hauled out on the nearby bank beneath the tree. One of them is The Florida soft-shell turtle, which is found primarily in the state of Florida. The two in front of it are painted turtles.
The lazy north-flowing St. John's River is on the other side of the buildings. That is where most of the airboats are. We have been here many times over the years to ride the airboats and see the alligators hanging out with the cows. I did a few paintings several years ago of the cows along the river. This time, I focussed on the actual Fish-camp.
In the past two decades, many of the old camps were forced to close their doors and sell out to developers because they couldn't compete for the tourist dollars. The Lone Cabbage has held on to much of its rustic charm, but it's not the camp it used to be.
Now, it's basically a restaurant and airboat rides. From the 1950s through the 1970s, serious anglers would come here from all parts of the country to stay in the cabins and fish for a couple of weeks, Inman said. There was no restaurant. All you could get was bait, cold beer and maybe a pickled egg, if you were lucky. There were boats for rent, boat slips and ramps. The bait-and-tackle shop sold minnows, shiners, worms and mussels.
"Back then, the St. Johns was so full of fish you could walk down on the bank, slap on top of the water and reach down and grab one," said Norman Early, who bought the Lone Cabbage in 1973.
But in the late 1970s things started changing. The anglers stopped renting the cabins and boats. They came in RVs and brought their own vessels. Then they started using more plastic worms and lures. The live bait died waiting to be bought. Early closed the cabins and shut down the bait-and-tackle shop.
By 1981, when the state's theme parks and other attractions were booming, Early couldn't pay his bills. To raise money, he started holding fish fries on Sundays. Then he leased the Lone Cabbage to a man named Charlie Jones, who brought in the airboat business and built the restaurant. Every change came with complaints from old-timers.
Still, by most accounts the Lone Cabbage remains rustic. Gator tail and frog legs are prominent on the menu.

This impressionistic acrylic painting is on a 24” by 36” stretched canvas.

5/29/22.. 3rd place tie in the "SUNSET PAINTING" Contest

Uploaded

September 10th, 2021

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