A narrow, stagnant, weed-choked canal produced this male peacock bass.

During my high school crosscountry running days, practice was held at John Prince Park, in Lake Worth, Florida. We trained around Lake Osborne. And ran through heat so severe that fish kills due to freezing temperatures seemed a meteorological impossibility. I took my mind off thirst and leg cramps by watching the lake’s dedicated bass anglers.

The anglers worked the pepper grass and hydrilla beds so slowly, so patiently, that the throngs of jetskis and ski boats often made me feel sorry for those urban anglers. Sure, the scores of largemouth bass tournaments held on Osborne, and in Palm Beach County’s interconnected lake system, which includes Pine Lake, Lake Clarke, Osborne, Lake Eden and Lake Ida, attest to a productive largemouth fishery. But every fish I saw them catch seemed such a moral victory that the prospect of urban fly fishing amid the infernal whine of personal watercraft engines long deterred me from exploring these convenient waters. It took rumors of a peacock bass population proliferating in the chain to coax me out there. The chain has been stocked with them periodically, and a series of mild winters have allowed the lakes to produce some real trophies.

I started exploring the lake chain with my buddy Brett Fitzgerald, who lives on Lake Clarke. The canoe limited our range, but the prospect of finding a pet school of butterfly peacocks in our backyards motivated us to explore farther and farther out from Brett’s house. A half-dozen outings yielded many nice bass and panfish, dozens of other cichlids, but only one tiny peacock.

“You guys were fishing too far north,” Capt. Doug Kimball said, as we idled south from 6th Avenue. “Lake Clarke is great for big largemouths, but it gets cold enough in the central-county area that you only occasionally find a few small peacocks chasing shad up there in the summertime.”

Doug had invited Greg Snyder and me to fish through a sweltering day for both bedding and blitzing peacocks. Although we sweated off five pounds apiece, we caught numerous peacocks, largemouths and oscars.

At daybreak, Doug dropped the trolling motor in a little bay fed by a canal just southwest of the 6th Avenue bridge. The spot looked mighty fishy: A big grassbed guarded the canal entrance, and numerous docks provided cover along the seawalls. Doug assured us it held both largemouths and a school of peacock bass, which further complicated the age-old question, “How should we fish?”

Mayan cichlids -- relatives of peacock bass -- also take flies.

Peacocks like poppers, sliders and streamers fished at a good clip—fishing in Miami’s airport lakes with peacock-bass guru Alan Zaremba, I’ve had to use the double-handed stripping technique just to get their attention. And while largemouths knock the shine off a fast-moving buzzbait or soft plastic shad, flyfishing success for that native species usually requires slow, tantalizing presentations.

We decided to vary our targets. Snyder fished a No. 4 chartreuse popper, I tied on an orange-and-white Clouser Minnow, and Doug alternated between a walking plug and a swimming plug. Snyder fished his popper at a snail’s pace, which fooled a couple of respectable largemouths. Doug caught a largemouth on the Top Dog, and I caught a humongous oscar on the Clouser. But no peacocks. Doug looked worried—he’d taken us directly to the honeyhole. Two weeks prior, a sewer line was ruptured and 100,000 gallons of raw human excrement had poured into Ida. The water quality looked suspect at best—small algae blooms floated in the tannin atmosphere. There’d been no word of a fish kill, but we had to wonder.

We moved south to another small, half-moon bay in the backyard of an apartment complex. Beneath the manicured lawn, an unruly, subaquatic hydrilla hedge extended out into open water. Again, largemouths assaulted the surface flies and Doug’s lure the second they hopped off the mat. And 3-pound oscars attacked my black-and-orange Clouser with the voracity of piranhas. But no peacocks. We visited another dock-studded bay while the sun was still too low to sightfish the beds. The schoolie largemouths inhaled poppers, the oscars became a pestilence and finally, about the time we were ready to declare Cichla ocellaris extinct in Palm Beach County, Doug fooled one small peacock with a Rat-L-Trap.

“Let’s try the canals,” Doug suggested, once the brutal sun climbed above the houses.

The heat and humidity in those tepid canals were the only environmental qualities akin to the Amazon basin, but they were chock full of peacocks. We idled into a narrow ditch constricted by protruding docks, and further constricted by mats of hydrilla. Small, orange, crater-like beds were swept out of the weeds near every culvert, piling, or PVC pipe. Guarding the beds, bull peacocks glared up at us menacingly, as if they planned to ram the hull with their humped heads.

“Careful not to spook them,” Doug quipped.