A perfect, windles day for fly fishing with 6-weights and small poppers. Bert Gibson throws a tight loop.

By early June last year, Lake Okeechobee was low, 11 feet, three inches, so low bass and panfish were jammed into natural depressions and manmade canals around Belle Glade.

“The schoolies are thick,” said Capt. Pete Moore, “and you’re guaranteed to take home a mess of big, copper-nosed bluegills.”

Pete, one of the few Lake O guides who primarily fly fishes, has been on the lake since the late ’60s, and has devoted decades’ worth of springs to bass bugging. Before rising water temps become suffocating, a bass bugger, if he finds the right ditch, can outfish his hardware-chunking brethren a dozen fish to one. Plus, bring home a mess of panfish fillets.

Throughout summer, the Everglades teems with insect hatches, and the hungry, competitive fish keep one eye on the surface, at least during the cooler hours of the day. So, early in June, Pete carried us out to the old irrigation ditches that snake through Kramer Island and Ritta Island, the very canals where my dad learned to fly fish as a kid, and where he taught me when I was a young boy. Pete has worked hard to prevent a dubious sheet-flow restoration project from backfilling most of these canals (see sidebar), and wanting my first visit to the place in many years to be memorable, he reserved a day for us right before the full moon.

The water at Pelican Bay was so low Pete had to make the tight turns into the canals without coming off of plane. He didn’t mind—low water keeps all but the most determined anglers out, it helps encourage important aquatic and subaquatic grasses, and it concentrates fish in the canals. Plus, a wild streak runs through old Pete; when he gets behind the wheel of his bass boat, he grins as gleefully as a kid revving his hotrod. But, as the bass boat settled into the tepid water, smoky wisps of fog glowed red around the running lights, and the glittery vessel—all gadgets and sharp lines—seemed a time machine touching down on “big waters.”

That’s the effect, anyway, that fishing and hunting on Lake Okeechobee often has on me, especially when fishing or hunting with folks who’ve long known the lake. On that foggy morning, the long, gnarled fingers of history tapped me firmly on the shoulder.

As Dad and Pete reached for 6-weight rods they were as anxious and enthusiastic as boys. The verdant marsh and soft morning light made them look much younger, and I could easily picture my father as a teenager fly fishing from the pram he rowed out from Torry Island, as well as Pete making his first tentative explorations of the lake in an old johnboat. I could also picture the Stein boys rebuilding the levees after the ’47 hurricane, then again after the storm in ’49, when the family farmed Kramer Island.

June is a prime month for big bluegills.

“The storms washed the levees into the canals,” Fritz Stein Jr. told me, “so Dad sent me on dynamite runs to Miami. They also washed out the twin bridges, so we ferried work crews out in a barge. We bought an Army surplus crane, and used a dragline to move the barge one toss of the bucket at a time. The bucket left ‘dinosaur tracks’ in the lake bottom—shellcrackers still love to bed in them.”

When he got a break from farming, Stein also loved to ply the banks with poppers. He’ll tell you that those canals, which ran with the blood, sweat and pathos of Glades’ pioneers, have always attracted birds, bass and panfish. Now, the marsh has reclaimed fields, and the area is a natural historical irony. The old fields became prime habitat for dabbling ducks, wading birds and forage fish, and when lake levels are falling, little rivulets drain them into the canals. Then, the entire food chain lines up at the mouths of those drainages in ascending order.

A gator lurked at the mouth of one of those rivulets.

“When the gators are up like that,” Pete said, “they’re feeding on bass.”