About six weeks ago I drove to a freshwater canal a little north of here the day after a massive rainstorm. This wasn't a very smart move, as the canal had flooded up over its banks and inundated the surrounding neighborhood. I wasn't able to reach the canal at all; in fact, I could have used my kayak in some of the nearby streets, which were full of water.
I went back to this canal yesterday and found all had returned to normal. The boat ramp is in a quiet neighborhood park and doesn't seem to get very much use - or at least it hasn't when I've been there in the past. The setting isn't particularly scenic. One shoreline has back yards with wooden boat docks, the other has some commercial properties. And I95 is just a few hundred yards to the east. Nevertheless, I've caught some nice fish there, including a couple of peacock bass, which are trying to make a comeback after being killed off by cold weather a few years ago. In the past, I've always fished this spot in the morning, although it has seemed to me that the action got better as the sun rose higher in the sky. Yesterday morning was cool and overcast, after a bit of rain the night before, so I decided to wait until after lunch to launch my kayak.
I was in the water and fishing by two o'clock. I've had good luck recently using my seven weight flyrod, a tiny chartreuse popper fly and a sink tip line. So that's what I started with.
A good breeze was blowing down the canal from the west and I pedaled in that direction. A quarter mile from the boat launch the canal intersects another canal, which runs north/south. Once I reached that intersection, I let the wind blow my kayak slowly to the east, back toward the boat ramp. There's a line of submerged weeds a few feet from the shoreline and I cast my popper close to the weeds and let the sink tip line pull it down a few feet once it cleared the weed line. Within the first ten minutes I had brought to the boat two sunfish and a mayan cichlid, another of south Florida's exotic species of fish.
That action pretty much continued throughout the rest of the afternoon. I worked both shorelines of the east/west canal and also spent some time on the larger, north/south canal, where I saw quite a large fish come up and take something off the surface. I didn't get a good enough look at it to identify it. I'm hoping it was a peacock bass. The peacocks I've caught in that area in the past year or so have been on the small size. If what I saw yesterday was a peacock, that would be very encouraging indeed.
I lost what would have been the biggest fish of the day when it came "unbuttoned" while I was dragging it up to the surface after an extended fight. I never managed to get a look at it, so I can't say what it was. The biggest fish I did get into the boat was a largemouth bass that was around 15-16 inches. There are bigger fish than that in those waters but when I'm pulling in fish after fish on a fly rod using a surface fly, I'm not gonna complain that none were monsters.
I headed back to the boat ramp around 5:30. There was caution tape across one of the two ramps and as I drew closer I saw that a boat lay submerged and upside down just off the end of the ramp. That was definitely not there when I first put in at two o'clock. Apparently, someone had had a disaster of a boat launch since I had pedaled away from the area. Two young men were launching wave runners from the other ramp. I managed to get my kayak up and over the submerged boat and onto my trailer. The wave runner guys meanwhile were gunning their engines out in the canal, creating huge waves that they then ran up and over, as they circled around and around like they were practicing for a stunt wave-runner team. Every fish for a mile in either direction would have been freaked by the roar of their engines and the turbulence they were creating. I'm just glad I came in off the water before the wave-runner guys got out onto it.
Here's a link to the video I shot: http://youtu.be/UjXt9DpPk2g Sorry for the extended view of my bare legs as I pedaled my kayak and set the scene at the beginning. I'll try to avoid that in the future.
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