Across the canal, we could see the back side of a department store.
"That's Bloomingdale's," Allen Zaremba said as he guided his bass boat into the water. "If you get tired of fishing, I'll drop you off and you can go shopping. Actually, I know some guys who do that. They drop their wives off to shop and they go fishing for a couple of hours."
As soon as we were in the boat, though, Zaremba left Bloomingdale's behind as we headed into the canals of Dade County, Florida, to do some of the most unusual bass fishing in the Northern Hemisphere--for butterfly peacock bass.
Until a few years ago, die-hard anglers who wanted to fish for peacock bass had to make an expensive trip south to Colombia, Brazil, or Venezuela. But in the 1980s Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish biologist Paul Shafland proposed a project to introduce butterfly peacock bass into southeast Florida canals. His plan was to use the bass--a predator like the native largemouth--to help control burgeoning populations of other exotic fish species in the canals.
After jumping through all the administrative hoops necessary to get permits for the project--and they were myriad--Shafland released 20,000 butterfly peacock bass fingerlings into the canals between 1984 and 1986. Not only did the fish chow down on the exotics in the canals, they grew and reproduced and developed into a fishery that is attracting the attention of anglers all over the country.
Despite the fact that it's an exotic, the Commission has gone to great pains to protect the butterfly peacock bass. Until 1989 the species was entirely protected; any angler catching a peacock had to return it to the water immediately. Even today, the daily bag limit is two fish, only one of which may be more than 17 inches long.
One of the attractions of the butterfly peacock is that it's an all-year fish. If you can take the heat, Zaremba says, you can catch peacocks any time of year. But he does his main fishing during the winter months, when south Florida's sun is not quite so hot or so intense as it is in the summer. Another nice thing about them is that they're all-day fish. None of this getting on the water before the sun's up; we started fishing about 8:30 a.m.
On the day we fished, in the middle of February, the sun was already hot and the fish were starting to spawn. Through the greenly clear water we could see them, two at a time, holding on rocky ledges along the sides of the canals. We could also see a lot of other fish: tilapia mostly, though now and then a flash of color showed the presence of other non-native fish the peacock bass feed on. Once, a cloud of neon tetras swam by; you can see almost any popular aquarium fish in these waters.
We began by offering the peacocks gold Rapalas, bringing them in with a steady retrieve as if they were deeper running crankbaits. Nothing.
Zaremba put a live shiner on a hook and let it out behind us as we moved slowly through the canals. At first, nothing happened. Then the rod tip bent and I had to grab the rod to keep it from disappearing overboard.
On the other end was a little largemouth. Wrong fish. After a couple of hours of this, Zaremba was getting frustrated. He likes for his clients to catch fish, and we weren't. On the front of the boat, he tied on a chartreuse tube bait with a skirt. The next time we eased up on a pair of peacocks, he gently pitched the bait right onto the ledge they were guarding. The male darted at the bait but did not pick it up.
Five, eight, ten times Zaremba pitched the bait onto the ledge. Finally the fish snapped at it, Zaremba set the hook, and the fish was his. After we finished taking photos, he eased the fish back over the side and into the water.
Although butterfly peacocks are fussier than largemouth bass about what they'll hit, they still take a variety of lures. Zaremba swears by tube baits such as the one he used the day I fished with him.
"Any one with a skirt will work," he says. "When they're spawning, that's one of the best ways to fish for them. Otherwise you can catch them with Rapalas, but you tend to get hooked up in the rocks pretty bad with those. I like to twitch a Rapala once or twice to get their attention, and then bring it back with a steady retrieve. They'll hit it on the retrieve. And there are times when they'll hit it right at the boat."
He recommends a medium-heavy action spinning (not baitcasting) rod for topwater plugs and for pitching. And as far as fly fishing is concerned, he says it works only during the fall when peacocks are schooling.
"Streamers work then, but poppers will work, too," he says. "But you've got to be quick with them--you've got to be able to work a fly rod pretty good." When they're schooling, he fishes for them much like anglers in other parts of the country fish for stripers.
"I like to throw spoons, Rattletraps, Torpedos, Rapalas. They'll take a large range of those things," he says. "And when they're schooling, they like the bait moving." When butterflies school, he says, they tend to do so by size.
"When they're schooling, they're running in the one- to two-pound range, though sometimes you'll find a bigger fish following behind them. But a lot of times the bigger fish seem to just run in pairs."
Unlike largemouth bass, Zaremba says, butterfly peacocks will spawn any time of the year.
"I think their primary spawning period is March through June," he says. "Generally speaking, they're in two to three feet of water."
Zaremba also finds some interesting similarities and differences between butterfly peacocks and largemouth bass.
"I think they're a stronger fish than a largemouth," he says. "They will fight you longer; bigger ones will pull off some serious drag. They fight more like a saltwater fish; they shake their heads more than a largemouth."
A lot of the fish we saw weren't quite committed to their beds; when we dropped tube baits in front of them, they simply vanished. But late in the day, we found one more pair that was tenacious about the spot they had chosen. No matter how many times we dropped the tube bait in front of them the male would charge it to drive it away but would not pick it up.
As long as the fish would stay on his ledge, we decided, we would persevere. Finally our persistence paid off. After I timed 55 minutes of dropping the tube bait almost on the fish's head, we finally got him irritated enough to pick the bait up off the ledge. A quick hook-setting and we had him. This one, too, we released as soon as we had photographed him.
Coming back through the canals to Bloomingdale's, I wondered whether Commission biologist Paul Shafland knew, when he set out to find a good predator to release in south Florida's canals, that he was creating a multi-million dollar fishery. Probably not. But he certainly made one heck of a fighting fish available to thousands of anglers who otherwise would never have gotten to fish for South America's butterfly peacock bass.
Allen Zaremba takes full-day guide parties wherever the butterfly peacocks are biting in Dade and Broward counties in south Florida. Contact him at 305-961-7512. He advises that the best time to reach him is in the evening.
Copyright (c) 1997 Carolee Boyles-Sprenkel. All rights reserved.
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