Florida: Swamp Life & Mayan Cichlid, Walking Catfish, Warmouth Catch & Cook

A big part of fish bum living is finding free or cheap accommodations while on the road on a fishing trip. Noah and I have slept in his van in a variety of parking lots all over the northeast. We've slept in sleeping bags right on the beach too. But with a multi week trip well over 1000 miles from home it is smart to have much more secure accommodations. And Florida provides these in the form of free camp sights, to be reserved through the FWC and various water management districts. Choose one close to a good fishing area, stick the permit in the car windshield, and enjoy camping in the swamp.

I loved it. It gives me so much satisfaction, just camping and fishing for days and just really living it. You get to experience so much more this way. Wildlife. Weather. The night sky. Camp meals. Exhaustion. It's all a part of the story.

As densely populated as many parts of Florida are there are still some truly wild places left, with miles of pinewoods, hardwood hammocks, and swamps. Unlike CT, FL still has enough North American cougars that the state has to recognize their presence. There are still plenty of bears in FL too. The wild places that are left truly are teaming with wildlife. And spending almost two weeks right among all this native and non-native flora and fauna is quite an experience. 

Herps are particularly abundant in Florida, which is no surprise: it is perfectly suited for them. Very warm most of the year, and a dichotomy of both very wet and very dry. The rat snakes, corn snakes, coral snakes, rattlesnakes and tortoises love the dry parts, the alligators, turtles, frogs, and water snakes love the wet parts.

Where we camped near Jupiter we had a lot of friendly alligators close by. Actually, the started out mostly on the other side of the pond from our camp. Then, when they figured out we had discarded some fish carcasses, they started to relate to that corner of the pond. There's a reason they say don't feed the wildlife folks! The way I chucked the fish wouldn't have given the gators much to put two and two together with, but if you stood on the bank of that pond every day and splashed a fish carcass around, those little buggers would start attacking people standing on the banks. The speed with which they had figured out where there was a new food source was, though not surprising, pretty impressive. As well as the speed with which they figured out what time that food was going to show up. Given another two nights of the same behavior those gators would probably have known that our presence in the camp site meant food. So... don't huck your fish carcasses in the pond.

Another piece of advice: the ground is hard. Don't forget to bring a sleeping mat or air mattress. Neither Noah nor I brought one. That was a mistake. There ended up being a few things that I had to buy on this trip, including a new sleeping bag. For some reason I didn't bother with a pad as well. I will say, though it isn't restful sleep, hard ground sleep is easy to wake up from in time to get on the water before the sun does. 

On two of our last nights, we decided to catch and kill for our dinner. Whether we admit it or not part of the satisfaction we get out of fishing comes from our deeply rooted need to provide food for ourselves. It's just in our nature. 

There are fish that I personally don't think should ever be harvested, fish that I don't think should be harvested in certain circumstances, fish that I think should be harvested selectively, and some fish in some circumstances that should be harvested with extreme prejudice. I am also of the opinion that a fish released to die does not equal a fish wasted, but that is something I may touch on ore thoroughly at another time. In Florida, we had a plethora of invasives and some extremely prolific natives at our doorstep. We were in a very undeveloped area, so we were safe to assume these fish were clean, and keeping them would do no harm. So we decided to keep a bunch of a few species we hadn't heard much about in a food context: warmouth, walking catfish, and Mayan cichlids. We knew walking catfish were popular in the Vietnamese community, and their introduction was actually a result of that. But we didn't know a thing about cleaning them or how they would taste. I had never heard of anyone eating a warmouth, but a sunfish is a sunfish... I couldn't see how they could taste bad. As for Mayans, I knew the local Latin Americans ate them but once again I had no idea how they would taste. 

The regiment on the first night was filet, coat in Doritos crumbs, and fry. We had walking catfish and warmouth only that night. The Dorito crumbs did not do much to provide flavor but it made a good enough breading, so we got a pretty good idea of what the fish tasted like. Walking catfish... tasted like nothing. They had no flavor. The texture wasn't my favorite, and I'm not really sure how to describe it. Overall it was good, but nothing to write home about. Warmouth? Entirely as expected. It was just typical, good eating sunfish. 

The next night we ended up getting a good pile of Mayan cichlids, which was great because it just meant we had more meat to work with. We had went and gotten some Old Bay to make up for the lack of flavor from the Doritos, and that was ideal. It certainly made the walking catfish more flavorful (duh). We cleaned and cooked in the same way. I have to say, Mayan cichlid may well be the best freshwater fish I've ever tasted. It was like extremely tender chicken, just the perfect light, flaky, subtle flavored fish. I will go out of my way to eat fresh Mayan cichlid out of clean water (a lot of Floridian canals are just so polluted I'd have to be starving to eat something out of them) any time I am in state. They were that good.  

Living out of a van in the swamps and forests of Florida was a hell of an experience. I will do undoubtedly be doing it again, because there is so much there that I have yet to experience. I do love that place.