Spot Hopping Tamiami & Big Cypress Loop

My morning ritual while we camped in Florida consisted of putting some clean clothes on, exiting our tent, stretching, then going to relieve myself. And I have to say; though this may be one of the stranger ways I've ever started a blog post; relieving myself while looking at some of the prettiest scenes I've yet gazed over each morning became such a wonderful routine that I've been disappointed each morning since returning home that I can't simply get up in the early morning, step outside barefoot, walk some distance from the house, and pee with no worries at all of human on-lookers seeing something they don't want to and a hell of a great view to look at while I go about my business. It's those simple little things in life that keep me from falling too deeply into depression. I'm a simple man, I like to watch the sun sparkle off dew and warblers flit around while I take my morning pee.

Noah is less of a morning person, so I usually had a bit of me time each morning. I enjoyed that time especially in the Everglades, because I was just so happy to finally get to see more of one of the most amazing places on the planet.

We decided our first full day would be a spot hopping day. Actually, every day ended up being that, and such is the name of the game on the Tamiami trail. Drive, look, see something fishy, fish it, move on. Or... drive, see big turtle, stop, chill with said turtle, move on.

Apalone ferox, Florida softshell turtle

We headed back East along the Tamiami, bouncing spot to spot without much of note for a white. There were a lot of gar and a lot of alligators, but that is to be expected.

Lepisosteus platyrhincus, Florida gar

Alligator mississippiensis, American alligator

Eventually though we found some more interesting fishing in a place we'd hit on our first trip here. There was a lot of construction going on at some of the spillways, and at those where there wasn't there wasn't much flow, but we managed to find some willing fish at one of the spillways. It wasn't lights out oscar fishing and blitzing peacocks like our first visit but it wasn't bad.

Lepomis gulosus, warmouth

Cichla ocellaris, butterfly peacock bass

Astronotus ocellatus, oscar

I was most hoping for a jaguar guapote, and I saw more than one and I think I missed some takes from them too, but I just couldn't seal the deal. We bounced to a place we'd not been before pretty far east and found loads of small gar and Mayan cichlids before heading back the way we came to get to the Big Cypress loop road. We hoped that we'd find more native fish than invasives there.

Cichlasoma urophthalmus, Mayan cichlid

It turned out that most of the spots along the loop road were still just loaded with Mayan cichlids, oscars, jewel cichlids, and some pike killifish that we saw but could not catch. There were native sunfish species too but just not what we expected. We'd thought there'd be a lot of bass there, that's what we'd heard at least. Moreover, the gators there were especially fixated on us. At one point we moved from one side of a culvert to the other to get away from a gator, but when I hooked on oscar that started splashing on the surface we could hear that gator turn on the thrusters and accelerate through the culvert. I pulled the oscar out just feet ahead of the hungry gator. It's pretty clear just how insistent these gators were from the photos below. This is the problem with tourists feeding the wildlife... it gets dangerous for everybody. 

We managed to spot hop all day without catching any new species, which in the Everglades is a little bit impressive. But the day was not lacking in quality of experience. There are some places that grab my soul and demand I explore every inch. Maine is one of those places. The Everglades is another. I feel an absolute need to experience as much of it as I can and this day had fulfilled a little more of that. One last stop on the Tamiami before heading to camp for dinner yielded my first Everglades bowfin. It wasn't big, but it was my first 'fin of the year, and it was awesome.

Soon the sky was darkening, and it was time once again for us to set out seeking snakes crossing the road. But that is the subject of a future post.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Peacock Palooza

I'd caught some peacock bass in my limited time in Florida. Never many and never big, but they are spectacularly pretty and hard fighting fish so it was easy to be happy with what I got. Hailing from south America, the butterfly peacock bass, the species most abundant in South Florida, and every other peacock bass species (yes, there are more than one), is actually a cichlid. They get a bit bigger on average than the other predatory cichlids in Florida (Nile and blue tilapia get quite large but aren't apt to slam a fast stripped streamer very often) and were introduced with the intent of controlling those other species. Ah yes, the old introduce a non-native species to control a non-native species. It didn't work with cane toads and cane beetles in Australia and it hasn't really worked with peacock bass and the plethora of invasives it was hoped that they'd control in Florida. But they are there to stay now, and they are wicked fun on the fly rod, or any light tackle for that matter. I was pretty excited to get to fish for them in a known productive area again. Noah and I, on our way towards the Everglades and the Tamiami Trail, payed a visit to a spot my friend Sonny showed us three years ago. This was a quasi-legal cluster of ponds loaded with peacocks. We weren't after new species here at all... we were just here to see if we couldn't improve our personal bests and catch more peacocks in a day than we had before. Given our limited experience and success in this fishery, such improvement wasn't difficult to live up to. But I hadn't the slightest inkling this would be probably the best half day of freshwater fishing of the trip.

We walked into the quite nice, clean looking neighborhood prepared to fish a bunch of different ponds, on a circuit that would loop us back around to where we started eventually. I was going to fish small minimally weighted baitfish patterns with broad profiles... this is was seemed to work best three years prior. It proved it's worth quickly with a couple of small peacocks, but it would take me some time to hone my technique. Peacock bass will eat and spit out a fly so quickly, you almost had to be in the act of strip setting when the fish eats. So a quick retrieve is ideal. It also gets them fired up when you try to get the fly away from them. They don't seem to like losing a race.

The first few fish we caught were little ones, but it didn't take long for us to start catching higher caliber fish. Though they still weren't big peacocks, even for this smaller species that never really obtains the sort of hulking size some of it's cousins do, these fish still pulled like hell.

As we hopped from pond to pond on our loop and continued to figure things out it started to become clear that we were going to catch an awful lot of peacock bass this day. Noah quickly outpaced my count with shad darts, but I eventually got my retrieve and hook set honed well enough to start making up the difference again. Each pond with good structure produced at least a few fish.

The peacocks were the predominant capture, other species found our offerings as well. Notable was this big colorful Mayan cichlid:

We spent almost as much time on our second to last and last stops as we did on the entire rest of the loop, because those two ponds were especially loaded. The first had a length of shoreline with a bunch of bedding fish and some sporadic blitzes breaking out in the open water. By this time, Noah had lost his shad darts and was struggling to find something quite as productive. He eventually found his stride again but I was just on my most consistent string of fish yet using a small white craft hair baitfish. I figured out that some of the bedded peacocks wanted it raced, like most of the fish not on beds wanted it, but others would slam it if I just plopped it over their bed and let it sink. When I stripped the fly past the largest of the peacocks I'd seen all day a few times it spooked each time. But when I let the fly fall dead, he absolutely crushed it. Though it was a more thinned out fish it was a really good one, far and away my personal best, and a spectacular specimen.

We were far from done though, and I continued to use the patterns I had deciphered to dupe more aggressive males. Their colors, their exaggerated forehead lumps, and their at times blazing red eyes made them very striking looking creatures.

When all was said and done, we'd caught an excessive amount of peacock bass. There were times in my early years when this post would have been even more photo heavy than it already is because I'd have taken photos of every fish that wasn't very small... the reality is, though what you see here is an excess of photos of peacock bass, it doesn't really shine light on the number we actually caught. It was crazy. We caught so many fish. By the end, my thumb was raw and I was bleeding in a few spots. This was the first time I'd gotten bass thumb from a cichlid species and I was proud of it. 

After three soul crushing days of failing to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, I so badly needed this. It set me up for the days to come, days we'd be spending in one of my favorite places on the planet... the Everglades. 

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Canals By Kayak: Attempting Clown Knifefish on Fly

Freshwater fishing in South Florida is game made tricky by spotty access, angry property owners, and overly abundant water. There's a lot of water that, to the untrained eye looks good, but doesn't actually hold much in the way of fish. Having a kayak or SUP is hugely advantageous as you are no longer bound to what minimal shore access exists but can travel freely throughout a canal system. That still doesn't mean you'll catch what you are looking for, but it does put you in a better position to do so. This is one of the numerous reasons Noah and I don't fly to Florida. We have more range and freedom.

Working our way south to where we'd spend the next two nights, Noah and I decided to fish the same canal system we were just on a day prior. It seemed like the best option and was on the way regardless. Noah's first fish proved our choice to be a good one.

Mine wasn't half bad either. This may be the same bull bluegill I caught in the same spot days before, I'm not sure. If it was, I didn't even mind. This has to be the best looking bluegill I've ever seen.

Upriver, I caught a less common species for as far north as we were... an oscar. It pounded a gurgler, which was pretty sweet. They've also got most freshwater fish beat fight wise, pound for pound. Unfortunately, aside from a few un-notable catches, there wasn't much else to report from that foray. There were a bunch of people fishing the spillway, and a canoe headed down while we were headed up told us they'd been catching small snook. They weren't when we got there, not anymore. We headed back down a little disgruntled, but having caught a handful of quality fish.

The next day, we were further south, in an area with even more diversity of freshwater invasives. Snakeheads, peacock bass, midas cichlids, and perhaps most excitingly, clown knifefish were to be our targets, and without our water crafts, we'd be hard pressed to find any that would be willing. Unfortunately the weather was not at all ideal, but we'd give it our all anyway.
Clown knifes roll, almost like tarpon or bowfin. I didn't think they'd hold to structure really, and that proved true. Peacock bass and snakeheads though would be holding onto their preferred structure. Weed beds for snakeheads, culverts expelling water for peacocks.
Noah got a blowup on a buzz toad that was almost certainly a snakehead, then I got a blast on an as of yet unnamed topwater pattern that may have been a snake as well. Further down the canal though, seeing a fair number of rolling clown knifes, I changed to a subsurface pattern.

I've never seen a single photograph or video of a clown knifefish caught on the fly. Given how inclined most flyfisherman (fisherman in general, really) to not think outside the box, I had perhaps too much confidence that I could convince one to eat. But, uh...
I made five casts in the vicinity of rolling clowns, and had one follow. I went the entire rest of the day without a single look from one, but I don't know jack about this species, really, and I convinced one to move on a fly first try. So this is something I am going to do. I have a game plan, I know some people, and I'm a little more determined than your average angler. Watch out clown knifefish. I'm coming for you.

Though we caught very little on this long paddle into unknown waters, it was a valuable experience and really illustrated the overall difficulty of finding freshwater fish in Florida if you don't know where to look. Most of the water we covered in these canals was essentially barren, with little in the way of structure for fish to hold to. When we found what little good structure there was, we found fish. I caught my first peacock bass in more than three years that day, and that was nice. Where I caught it was among only five places with notable concentrations of fish in legitimately miles of canal paddled. On foot? We'd almost certainly have done very poorly.

Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

Fishing the Tamiami Trail: Peacocks, Gar, and More!

Good morning Mr. Alligator!

The canals along the Tamiami Trail have been on my bucket list of fishing destinations for a while now. Mostly because it has a wild species diversity. As a multi species fisherman that makes it all the more interesting. The Tamiami has bass, tarpon, snook, sunfish, oscar, cichlids, gar, bowfin, plecos... it's one of those rare places where I actually didn't know what I was going to catch. I generally hate that idea... 'you never know what you're going to catch'. Yeah. Obviously. But if you don't at least have a pretty good idea, you have a LOT to learn. In this place I had a lot to learn. The first place Noah and I fished on the canal was a big spillway pushing a bunch of water, with tarpon and gar rolling all over but not at all willing to eat, some oscars sitting around, doing nothing, and plecos... everywhere. Pleco is short for plecostomous, an armored species of catfish that I believe found its way into Florida's canals from private aquarium releasing. They are now all over the place. And at this awesome looking spillway one pleco was all I could catch. But it was a fish I really wanted to knock of the list and finding hungry ones turned out to be tough, so I thank this one for grabbing the fly.

As it got dark the mosquitoes closed in, so we headed off to Big Cypress where we spent the night with the tree frogs and bugs.

In the morning we backtracked to an are with a canal intersection, and very quickly found schools of peacock bass blitzing on baitfish. These were eager, hard fighting fish, and it felt so good to find them so early in the day.

Below the peacocks were oscars, and unlike the ones we had seen the night before they were hungry. I caught the first one, but Noah ended up putting a hurting on them with a crappie jig, catching probably 50. These were yet another fish that overshadowed my expectations. Damn did they ever pull!

With the peacocks continuing to blitz, looking almost like false albacore as they slashed through the schools of bait, I figured I should try to get a fish or two on topwater. Easy peasy.

As the sun rose we decided to continue along hoping to find some different species. The next place we tried was around a bridge where the canal bled off south into the natural swamp. The first fish I spotted were gar. The first fish that took my fly was a gar. I was soon playing a very frustrating game that eventually just became funny, trying to keep a gar attached long enough to land it. Long SF blend flies that I had tied for the gar didn't work. Stinger hooks didn't work. repeated hooksets didn't work. some of the fish stayed pinned long enough to jump , which was immensely fun. After a while I hadn't landed any gar and only caught a few bass and oscars so we continued west.

The next spot, funnily enough, had even more gar. It also had blitzing largemouth that seemed nearly impossible to deceive and the most mayan cichlids we had seen in one place. After throwing bigger streamers at the gar for a while I gave up on them and tried to target mayans.

With a little carp fly on I discovered that not only were the mayans way pickier than I'd expected, but the gar were much more into the small fly. I jigged the fly next to their nose and they just gave it a cute, quick little nip. I swear it was just the cutest way a predatory fish could possibly catch its prey. Like a puppy catching a moth hovering next to its nose. Eventually, with that smaller hook and a hard trout-set, I had one well hooked. I yelled to Noah to bring the net. I had no expectation that the fish would stay pinned but I really, really, wanted it to. Gar, of any species, were a huge bucket list fish fr me, something I've dreamed of catching for years. They always seemed kind of unattainable, just a little out of reach, even though their range is dramatically closer than Florida. They seemed like the kind of fish I was just going to have to wait for. And all of a sudden there it was in the net. I couldn't believe it. I had just caught a gar!

With Florida Gar so seemingly quickly off my list, I tied on an even smaller nymph and focused fully on the bratty little mayan cichlids. Oscars plagued me and the mayan cichlids continued to be obnoxious.

Eventually I discovered that they would eat a fly that was resting on the bottom in front of them, and that resulted in the only one I would catch. Fine by me, another fish on the list. Fishing the small nymph turned a few of the gar too, so I got a few more great aerial displays before we moved on and stopped fishing on the Tamiami.

Big alligators. There were lot of them on the far side f the canal, and they were lazy!