Tight canal quarters call for strong-arm tactics with feisty peacocks.

During breeding season, male butterfly peacocks develop a distinct fatty lump on the top of their heads, and there is much speculation as to the purpose of this growth. Some scientists think it may provide a food source for the peacock’s fry for a period after hatching. Others think it may disperse a chemical marker that keeps the young close to the adult. In clear water, you can see tightly packed clouds of peacock fry swarming about the head of their protective father. The growth on the head is often rubbed raw, as if the young have been nipping away at the nodule. Regardless, peacock bass are territorial fish, and they defend their substrate most aggressively when they’re guarding the bed.

It takes a brick of a cast to spook a peacock off the bed; even if you spook one, the fish will return momentarily. But, fly fishing for bed-guarding peacocks requires a really accurate short game. Today’s stiff, 9-foot, saltwater-oriented rods are hard to load with short casts. They’re designed to cast long distances with aggressive tapers into wind, and loading them requires longer lengths of fly line and a deliberate double-haul, which translates into overmuch line speed for dropping a fast-sinking fly onto a bed at short range. So, choose a shorter, softer, slower rod. Shorter rods are more efficient levers, so you don’t need to make a bunch of false casts to load them, which get you into trouble in tight spaces.

I used an old favorite, an 8-foot, 6-inch, 6-weight, which once levered a 30-pound snook out of Whitewater Bay mangroves. It also proved itself on Dade County peacocks, and despite having a stiff butt, the rod is flexible enough to make short, precise casts with a weighted Clouser or a Woolly Bugger. It’s also great for making trout-stream-style parachute casts, which cause the streamer to plummet vertically toward the bed. This presentation seems to elicit more violent strikes. You don’t need much leader. A stiff, six-foot length of mono tapering down to 12-pound test suffices. Because of the thick hydrilla, it’s best to use knotless leaders nail-knotted directly to the fly line.

The record-setting team of Capt. Alan Zaremba and Marty Arostegui swear by flies that imitate small peacocks and other cichlids. Juvenile cichlids will forage on peacock eggs more fearlessly than native species. So, they both maintain that bed-guarding peacocks will attack such imitations even more aggressively than they’ll attack a leach pattern. Snyder had tied a bunch of orange-and-black Clousers, Bendback-style, due to the thick hydrilla. Tying one on, he looked as serious as a gunfighter. Aiming for the hump, he shot the fly right at a big male’s face. The fish inhaled the fly, and shot it out of its mouth like a spitball before Snyder could set the hook. This shootout went on for a dozen rounds: The fish either spit the fly out too quickly or merely nosed it off the nest. Finally, the big male became so enraged at this “baby peacock’s” audacity it crunched down on the fly with its strong jaws, and shot a look of impunity at Snyder. When it felt the hook’s sting, the 4-pounder, a very large specimen for Lake Ida, jumped twice ricocheting off a nearby dock, lunged under the boat, splashed my old coach, and eventually came to hand.

“That’s as big as any of the peacocks we’ve caught in this chain,” Doug said, and he’s been guiding on these lakes for nearly ten years. “We usually don’t get enough warm winters for them to grow that big.”

In every stagnant canal we caught peacock bass guarding yet another large year-class. And the canal habitat allowed us to fish all day without contending with the scourge of personal watercraft, which kept to the open lakes. Yet this summertime peacock-bass fishing seemed counterintuitive to us bass buggers. The hotter it got the more aggressively the fish fed. By midday, we switched to topwater tactics.

This 4-pound male is a large fish for Lake Ida.

“The bite’s been happening early afternoon,” Doug said, as we idled out of the canals. “Although it can happen at any time of the day, these fish seem to feed most actively in the hottest part of the day, especially into September and October.”

We began casting poppers, Dahlberg Divers and topwater plugs at weeds and structure around the canal entrances. It was slow at first, but the oscars kept us entertained. Then, around 2 p.m., a blitz occurred. Big schools of peacocks ravaged shad—and our flies and lures—for about half an hour. These blitzes mostly occurred at the canal entrances, or in the cul-de-sacs at the backs of the canals. But Doug said that when the South Florida Water Management District is moving water, he often finds them on the downcurrent side of the bridge pilings. Then, abruptly, the waterway became as still as a millpond. I reached into slushy ice in the cooler, and realized we’d consumed six quarts of Gatorade, two liters of water, and a six-pack of Diet Cokes.

“It’s hard to imagine that this water gets cold enough to kill anything, isn’t it?” Doug said. “Pray for another warm winter. That 4-pounder you caught will be a 6-pounder if it lives another season.”

FS