The boat ramp I used to put my kayak in the water is part of a county park. Very nice boat ramp - gradual decline and soft sand at the bottom of it. The whole park was quite nice. The canal is tree-lined along one bank, which gave it a more arboreal feel than Pioneer Canal park in Boynton Beach and the canals I've explored further south in Broward County. When I arrived, there was a bit of current moving from west to east. I imagine the South Florida Water Management District was shifting water from the Everglades to the ocean.
I started off throwing a tiny green popper close to the wooded shoreline, trying to slide it under overhanging branches wherever possible. The canal seemed fairly deep along that shoreline beneath the trees and I let my sink-tip fly line pull the popper down several feet before I'd cast again. After half an hour or so the fish weren't responding, so I put on a larger popper that would make a bigger commotion in the water and possibly attract fish lurking around the small boat docks I passed from time to time. This didn't work either, so I tried a clouser minnow, which has enough weight to get it down nine or ten feet. I finally did hook a fat bluegill on the clouser. But there was so much floating weed in the canal that I had to remove several strands of it after almost every cast I made.
As I was pedaling east with the current I passed over a school of enormous grass carp. Some of then had to be in the twenty pound range. They'd be quite a challenge to catch on a fly rod. I know some anglers do target this species with specialized techniques. As their name implies, grass carp are vegetarians and wouldn't be interested in anything I happened to have in my flybox.
After a while I went back to the tiny green popper (TGP), as its small hook sometimes manages to avoid snaring some of that floating grass. I caught another bluegill or two and a couple small largemouth bass.
Not long before I called it quits for the day I witnessed a phenomenon that a south Florida fishing guide once told me about. He said that around this tax season each April, ficus trees drop berries in the canals and grass carp will position themselves right below the branches to snatch these windfalls as they hit the water. When I fished with this guide, Steve Kantner, we were about a month too early for ficus trees to be dropping their berries. If I remember correctly, we tried to entice some grass carp anyway with a fly that looked somewhat like a red cherry made out of some kind of fabric. I found it difficult to cast and caught no grass carp that day; all I did was spook the few that we saw.
Yesterday I wished I had one of those flies with me. Every minute or so, when there was a bit of a breeze, half a dozen or so berries from this ficus tree would drop into the water and the grass carp would swirl beneath them. Unfortunately, I didn't think to pull the camera out of my shirt pocket and film this. I did take some humdrum video of what happened earlier in the trip. It can be seen at:
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