Back in sunny Florida after our brief stint in the frozen north country for the holidays.  Saw our daughter Emily and lots of friends while we were up there.  We're glad we made the trip and equally glad we headed south just ahead of the brutal arctic vortex that folks up there are dealing with now.

I like to fish close to home for my first couple of trips, once we get back here.  I caught a couple bass at our community pond on Sunday evening while walking along the shoreline.  Then yesterday I took my first trip of the new year in my kayak.   I'll try to embed the video in this post.  If it doesn't work, it'll be available on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF9Jimc6H2o

I took my kayak to the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Area and fished the canal and the canoe trail for a few hours.  It was warm and sunny but I knew the cold air up north was going to creep southward and spoil the fishing down here for the rest of the week.

I started off, as I usually do, using a plastic worm, just to gauge the action.  I had a bite on the first cast, then caught a small bass on the second.  Soon after that I switched over to fly tackle.  I was casting a small popper toward the sawgrass around the entrance to the canoe trail, where some small fish were hitting the surface.  The wind was coming across the Everglades from the west and the sawgrass around the entrance to the trail provided some protection from it and allowed me to cast the popper up close to the bank.  It looked enticing to me but not, apparently, to the fish, which ignored it.

The entrance to the canoe trail was blocked by some floating weeds.  I gave it some thought, then decided to paddle through them and try the trail for a while.  I switched to a plastic "fluke" worm that was easy to cast and seemed to move well in the water.  Fish went after it immediately.  Where it emerged from the surface, my line went every which way as fish tried to swim off with my plastic bait. Unfortunately, they were pretty small and they locked their mouths around the tail of my bait, a couple inches from the point of the hook.  No matter how much time I gave them, whenever I tried to set the hook I'd only succeed in pulling the bait out of their mouths.  I wanted to see what these fish were, and gave one quite a bit of time to show itself on the surface.  Eventually it just bit off the tail and so I never did get to see what kind of fish it actually was.  The tail-grabbers were probably small warmouth, of which there are an abundance at Loxahatchee.

Eventually I gave up on the canoe trail and spent the final hour of the morning fishing the main canal.  I managed another small bass on a plastic worm.  The action pretty much stopped around noon.  I stayed out until 12:30 or so and then pedaled back to shore.

Today the high temperature will probably only reach the 60s--frigid by south Florida standards.  I'll leave the fish alone for a few days.  By Friday, we're supposed to be back in the 80s and I'll be back on the water somewhere.