The Miami canals are the least glamorous great fishery in the country. No dock, no boat ramp worth the name, no captain in a logo shirt. You park on a residential street, walk down a mowed bank between a chain link fence and a row of royal palms, and cast into water that runs behind a strip mall and under a four lane road. Somebody drives past and looks at you. Ten minutes later you are attached to a fish that looks like it belongs in a tank at a dentist office, and the person who looked at you is already gone and will never know.
Butterfly peacock bass are not native here and nobody pretends otherwise. Florida biologists put them in these canals in the mid eighties to eat the tilapia and the oscars that had gotten loose, which is a rare case of a stocking decision that worked exactly as advertised and then quietly became a tourist attraction. They cannot survive a hard cold snap, which is why they live in south Florida and nowhere north of it, and why the good years follow the warm winters.
Everything you learned about largemouth is wrong here, and the first hour is spent unlearning it. A largemouth sits in the shade and waits. A peacock hunts in the open, in the sun, in the middle of the day, and it hunts by running things down. So you fish the bright side of the canal at noon with a live shiner or a small jerkbait worked fast, and when one commits it comes out from under the bank like a dog off a porch. There is no subtlety in it at all. The strike happens at full speed, misses happen at full speed, and a peacock that misses will turn and come back at it twice more out of what can only be described as spite.
They fight above their weight and they fight dirty. A four pound peacock will take you into the pilings under the bridge, into the one shopping cart that lives in every canal in Dade County, and around the only overhanging limb for a hundred yards, in that order. Get one to hand and the colors are worth the walk. Gold flanks, three dark bars, a black eye spot on the tail ringed in white, and that orange throat that shows up when the fish flares and refuses to be photographed politely.
We fished four bridges in an afternoon, caught eleven fish, and ate lunch standing up in a parking lot. A boat trip out of the Keys the same week would have run four hundred dollars and produced a nicer photograph. It would not have produced the man on a bicycle who stopped, watched one get landed, said one word about it, and pedaled off without slowing down.
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