By Steve Waters
When water levels drop in Everglades canals in the spring, the fishing is as good as it gets.
How good? So good that Capt. Alan Zaremba says there’s no such thing as a bad cast. Just get your lure somewhere on the water and chances are excellent that you’ll get a bite.
The reason is that as water levels fall in the marshy interior of the Everglades, bass and other species are forced into the canals that crisscross the River of Grass.
“You can catch bass here year-round, but this is the time of year when you can catch a lot of bass. They’re concentrated, coming out of the marsh areas,” said Zaremba, of Hollywood, who specializes in guiding anglers for peacock bass in South Florida’s urban canals, but focuses on the Everglades this time of year.
“This year we’ve got optimal conditions. So depending on when the rainy season kicks in, which I figure is usually the third or fourth week in May, get out now while you can and enjoy it.”
On a typical day, Zaremba might have two anglers catch and release well over 200 largemouth and peacock bass in an eight-hour trip. In addition, his charters catch bluegills, spotted sunfish, shellcrackers, speckled perch, chain pickerel, mudfish and non-native species such as oscars, Mayan cichlids and jaguar guapotes.
On a recent two-hour trip late in the afternoon, Zaremba and I caught about
40 largemouth and peacock bass, as well as some Mayans and oscars, using a 5-inch Bagley Minnow B floating jerkbait on 6- to 7-foot medium action spinning rods with 15-pound braided line and 20-pound monofilament leaders.
Sometimes the bites would come as soon as the lure landed on the water.
Other times bass would hit after we’d reeled back the lure almost to Zaremba’s flats boat. And several times we got bites when the lures were simply sitting on the surface while we were deep into conversations about fishing, family or current events.
“Anybody can throw it and catch fish,” said Zaremba of his favorite lure,
which he sells on his website www.worldwidesportsfishing.com. “It will catch all different species, so they don’t have to be a Joe Pro, and I think that’s important. You can drag it out the back of the boat and something’s going to hit it. You could be talking to your partner and something comes up and hits it. Sometimes we catch two bass at a time on those lures.”
Other lures that Zaremba likes when Everglades water levels are low include topwater plugs such as Baby Torpedoes, Chug Bugs and Pop-Rs, and his fly-fishing customers have great success throwing poppers and woolly buggers. Zaremba also likes seven-inch Gambler ribbontail worms, which can be reeled on the surface through the lily pads, hyacinths and other vegetation that lines most canals to imitate a small snake.
Zaremba said live worms such as nightcrawlers will catch oscars, Mayan
cichlids, spotted sunfish and bluegills. He added that live shiners are not necessary or as effective as lures.
“You’ll catch more fish on the artificials right now than you will on live bait,”
Zaremba said. “And how many dozen live baits would you have to bring out here to catch 200 bass? You’re going to need a lot of shiners.”
The other attraction of the Bagley Minnow B is that it can be fished a variety of ways and it holds up well even after catching hundreds of fish in the Everglades, which run from Tamiami Trail to the Broward Palm Beach county line west of U.S. Highway 27 and from Loxahatchee
National Wildlife Refuge to Sawgrass
Recreation Park east of 27.
“They last a long time,” said Zaremba of the jerkbaits, which he upgrades with Daiichi blood-red treble hooks. “And I can use it twitching on the surface. I can use it as a jerkbait down below. And I can troll with it. Anytime you can work something a bunch of ways, you can target different things.
“If you find the bass are out on a deeper ledge, they’ll come up and hit that
jerkbait, which might be going down only three feet. But it’s giving off enough flash and it also has a rattle in it, so it makes a little more noise.”
Good spots to fish include the canals along Interstate 75, which is more
commonly known as Alligator Alley. Lots of smaller bass bite in the finger canals north of the Alley on the west side of U.S. 27. As water levels continue to drop, the fishing will only get better everywhere.
That makes this a great time to introduce youngsters to fishing. Growing
up in Miami, Zaremba said he and neighborhood kids would fish in local
canals. Given the residential and commercial development in South Florida
over the past few decades, kids no longer have that type of access to fishing.
Bringing them out to the Everglades for a few hours of catching fish can hook them on the sport.
It helps to use what Zaremba calls his three-stop rule for kids:
“Stop and fish for a while and when they start getting antsy, you go for a little boat ride.
Start fishing again. They start getting antsy, go for a little boat ride. That gets them back in the groove again. Start fishing again and when they get antsy for the third time, it’s time to go to the house, whether that’s two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours. Every kid’s different.”
But they’ll all love catching lots of fish.