Florida Bass Fishing (Capt. John Leech)

Florida Bass Fishing is the guide business built around Captain John Leech, who moved to Florida to work as a fishing tackle representative back in 1975 and ended up staying to fish Lake Tohopekaliga and the rest of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes professionally. Decades later, the operation is still built the same way most serious bass guide services in this part of the state are: one captain, one boat, and a schedule built around putting clients on fish rather than running a big tourism operation.

Lake Toho has a long-standing reputation among bass anglers, partly because of a handful of record catches over the years and partly because the lake’s mix of shallow grass flats, deeper channels, and stretches of hydrilla and reeds gives largemouth bass a lot of cover and forage. Guided trips here typically launch out of a local ramp on the Kissimmee side of the lake, with the captain running the boat, working the trolling motor, and positioning clients over likely water while they fish, rather than the captain fishing alongside them. That is standard practice for bass guiding and it means most of the day is spent actually casting rather than running long distances between spots.

Trips are generally offered as half-day or full-day charters, with gear, licenses, and boat time included in the price. Anglers who show up without their own tackle are usually fine, since guide services like this one keep rods, reels, and a selection of baits on the boat, though serious anglers sometimes bring their own gear if they have specific preferences. Catch-and-release is the standard practice for the bass fishery here, both because Florida wildlife regulations protect the resource and because most guides, including this one, care about keeping the lake healthy for the long run rather than emphasizing how many fish get kept.

Because Lake Toho sits close to the Orlando theme park corridor, a fair number of clients are visiting families or business travelers looking to spend a morning or afternoon doing something that has nothing to do with rides or lines, while locals and regional anglers book trips specifically chasing trophy-sized bass during the cooler months when the bigger fish tend to be more active and easier to pattern. Either way, the appeal of a guided trip over renting a boat and going it alone is straightforward: someone who fishes this specific lake constantly and knows where the fish are holding on a given week can save a visiting angler a lot of trial and error.

This is not a fishing outfitter with a storefront, a fleet of boats, or franchise locations around the state. It is a single, long-running guide operation built on one captain’s decades of experience on one lake, and that kind of specialization is part of what keeps clients calling back trip after trip, year after year, whenever they are back in the Kissimmee area and want a morning on the water.