THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

This being a trip of a lifetime, I obviously wanted to fish for both. But due to the distances involved
commuting between sites, that wasn't possible, so I chose the payara, and ever since, with all the hype
now coming out surrounding the fighting abilities of the peacock bass, I felt as though I'd maybe made
the wrong call. Then one day quite out of the blue, as a result of sheer chance and family commitments,
that feeling of having missed out was rectified.
Not by a return trip to the Amazon. In fact it wasn't even a trip to South America. This time it was
Florida, thousands of miles to the north of the ancestral home of the peacock bass.
My wife Dawn had been getting on to me for some time to do a family holiday taking in Disney and all
the other theme parks while the grand kids were still at the right age to enjoy them.
I agreed to go on the proviso that I could take a couple of days out to fish. But for what. I'd done all the
inshore and offshore stuff several times over and was looking for a different challenge. So I Googled
the words 'Florida freshwater fishing', which to my surprise came back with peacock bass.
Intrigued, this triggered further investigation, and my introduction to a boat fishery I previously wasn't
aware even existed.
With its near tropical climate and abundance of freshwater habitat, Florida is the perfect location for
many alien species to establish themselves, something they have done to such an extent, that the Florida
Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) have been forced to take decisive and quite radical
action to try to keep these invaders under control.
The 'problem' it appears stems from fish enthusiasts releasing exotic species that have become too large
for their indoor aquariums. So much so that native species are coming under very real competitive
habitat threat from alien species such as oscars, cichlids, and tilapia, to name but a few, which are quite
literally taking over the place.
Native predatory species such as the large mouth bass are simply unable to cope. So the FWC came up
with the idea of making an alien introduction of their own that hopefully could, the Amazonian peacock
bass, which coincidentally also just happened to be regarded as one of the premier game fish on the
freshwater scene.
For many years, American sport
fishermen have been organizing
specialist trips to Brazil, Peru, and
Venezuela to target the species. But
now they don't need to, because
between 1984 and 1987, the FWC
introduced twenty thousand fingerling
butterfly peacock bass, and one hundred
of the potentially bigger speckled or
three barred peacock bass to the
metropolitan Miami canal system.
This isn't a canal system as we would
know it in the more industrialised parts
of Britain. It's more of a controlled
drainage network similar to the Fens,
excavated from believe it or not, solid land locked coral, and used to drain surface water from Miami
and the surrounding area.
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