Kenwood Recreation Area Boat Ramp

Two-lane concrete ramp with side-by-side launch areas, a launch dock, two picnic pavilions, and enough stabilized parking to absorb tournament fields from ten boats to a hundred and fifty. Free, open around the clock, and the busiest door on the reservoir — the natural start for the deep-water pool game.

Just south of the boat basin, the arrow-straight Barge Canal gives way to the curving drowned river — this is where the Cross Florida Barge Canal stopped when the 1971 order halted dredging. Take five minutes with the interpretive markers before launching; they carry the whole story, then you idle out onto the water the story made.

The deep game is immediate: the river channel and Barge Canal run to 30 feet between here and the dam, with stump flats on both sides. Summer means deep-diving crankbaits and Carolina rigs on the channel edges, shiners drifted over the stumps. Bound for the St. Johns? Check the Buckman Lock schedule before you commit.

Every three to four years the drawdown closes this ramp and a temporary launch at the end of Kenwood Road reaches the exposed Barge Canal channel. The most recent cycle ended with the spring 2026 refill. Check conditions before a winter trip in a drawdown year — the low-water reservoir is a different lake from the one in the photographs.

Kenwood was a steamboat landing before it was a boat ramp — a little railroad town with a two-story inn, a stop on the Ocklawaha's 19th-century passenger run to Silver Springs. The river that carried tourists by lamplight is the same water under the hull, one drowned oxbow at a time.