Cleaner Lakes Than Bellamy Lake
5 higher-graded lakes within 30 miles, ranked by grade improvement and proximity.
Bellamy Lake carries a Grade B (Good) water quality score. Within 30 miles, 5 lakes hold a higher grade. Citrus-Hernando Lake (Citrus County, Grade A, 1.6 mi away) is the closest meaningful upgrade.
Citrus-Bellamy Lake
- +Higher overall water quality score
Citrus-Dodd Lake
- +Higher overall water quality score
- +Lower phosphorus (10.5 vs 16 µg/L)
Reading the cohort
5 cleaner lakes sit within 30 miles of Bellamy Lake in the EPA water-quality dataset. With that many higher-grade neighbors close by, Bellamy Lake's Grade B reflects something specific to the lake itself — not a regional water-quality ceiling. The neighbor list below isn't a small set of marginal upgrades; it's a real cohort of meaningfully cleaner choices for the same Florida weekend.
The closest cleaner alternative — Citrus-Hernando Lake in Citrus County, Grade A — sits 1.6 miles from Bellamy Lake. At that distance, the substitution cost is essentially zero: same drive time, same regional access, demonstrably cleaner water on the EPA indicators. For repeat visitors who care about clarity or phosphorus levels, swapping the routine to Citrus-Hernando Lake is mostly a habit change rather than a logistics change.
The EPA water-quality grading combines clarity (Secchi depth), phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a measurements from state environmental sampling. A higher letter grade reflects measurably cleaner water on those indicators, not subjective beauty or access quality — a Grade A lake might have worse boat-launch facilities or shoreline access than a Grade C neighbor, so the ranking is one input alongside the rest of trip planning. See the methodology page for the full grading formula.
How this list is built
Every lake on LakeQuality has a calculated grade from EPA Water Quality Portal samples — secchi depth, total phosphorus, and chlorophyll-a measured against Metropolitan Council thresholds. To suggest cleaner alternatives, we filter lakes within 30 miles to those with a strictly higher numeric score, then rank by grade improvement with a small proximity tiebreak. Cross-state and limited-data lakes are excluded so the list stays locally relevant.