The Ocklawaha is the river Florida forgot to straighten out. It winds north from the Harris chain through the Ocala forest toward the St. Johns, tea colored and slow, with cypress leaning over it and hyacinth mats drifting along the edges like floating lawns. Everybody who fishes it is after bass or bream. Almost nobody is after the chain pickerel, which is a shame, because the pickerel is the one fish in that river that will eat something the size of your hand, in the open, in daylight, in October, and look offended that you were surprised.
I fished it out of a johnboat with a man named Dell who kept a cabin near Eureka and had opinions about the river that went back to before the dam. He ran a fifteen horse tiller and did not see the point of a trolling motor when you could drift. The pickerel, he said, sit on the edge of the hyacinth where the mat casts a shadow, and they do not chase so much as ambush. Put the fly a foot off the edge, strip it twice, and if there is a fish there you will know before the third strip. If there is not, move ten feet. He was right in the way people who have done something for fifty years are usually right, which is to say completely and without any interest in explaining why.
The fly was a big yellow and olive streamer with a weed guard, on a seven weight, which is more rod than the fish needed and exactly as much as the hyacinth did. The first pickerel came off a shaded point of weeds within the first hundred yards, a green and gold streak that hit the fly from the side, missed, turned around and hit it again. It went maybe twenty inches, which is a good Florida pickerel, and it fought the way they all do, a short furious run and a lot of thrashing at the boat, then it lay in the net like it had never been that worked up in the first place.
We drifted three miles of river that way through the morning and picked up nine of them, plus a bass that was embarrassed to be caught on a pickerel fly and a bluegill that was too proud to admit it. Every fish came off a shadow. Every strike was visible. The best one, a fish closer to two feet with a jaw like a duckbill, followed the fly all the way to the boat, sat under it looking at us for a full five seconds, then ate it so close I could have scooped it with my hand.
Dell said the pickerel is the only fish in the river that acts like it owns the place, and the only one nobody wants to catch. He said that was the kind of arrangement he could respect.
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