Florida multispecies mayhem in the canals - NJFishing.com Your Best Online Source for Fishing Information in New Jersey

Chrisper4694 · #1 09-09-2019, 01:35 PM

Headed down to florida the other week to fish with my buddy Morris Campbell. He left the whole week open for me and good thing too, cause there was only one day suitable to get out on the ocean. We did one day saltwater, one day shore based freshwater and one day boating the canals freshwater. I'll post the saltwater fish in the saltwater section.

We went to a couple of 'land locked' tarpon, snook, and redfish spots around punta gorda but couldn't manage to get a bite no matter what we tried. We did manage some large mangrove snappers though.

The next day we took a drive and boated the canals in the palm beach area. The day started off rough but we eventually got on a spot that had some active fish and we started hammering them pretty good! Ended up with 17 peacocks mix of butterfly and speckled, most average sized but a few quite hefty ones probably between 4-5lbs. In the mix with them we caught some feisty mayan cichlids (which fight harder pound for pound than most other fish...thought a few of them were big peacocks!) and an 18" largemouth.

We needed one more fish to complete the canal grand slam...the fish that wouldn't cooperate with us in the morning AT ALL. We got some lunch and drink at the convenient tiki bar right on the water and gave it maximum effort for the PM. Took a lot of looking but we finally found a spot that started giving up some clown knife fish! the weirdest looking and acting fish i'll probably ever see! I'm pretty sure the only other place in the world to catch them is India or Indonesia or one of those places. Such a cool fish, they can swim directly backwards and jump pretty damn high. one jumped clear over the net.

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Chrisper4694 · #2 09-09-2019, 01:38 PM

a few more cool pics, btw we didn't keep any, those doubles were just double headers

bigfishy · #3 09-09-2019, 02:52 PM

Well done as always... lots of exotics/invasives..
shoulda kept the iguana...
I here there beyond infested down there..

JDTuna · #4 09-09-2019, 03:06 PM

Freshwater madness! Lots of cool species there. Well done.

ALK11 · #5 09-09-2019, 05:15 PM

Looks like a nice trip. Gotta love all the fish down here.

NJSquatch · #6 09-09-2019, 09:20 PM

Sick! It is like you are fishing in a Giant fish tank.

Peacock is a bucket list fish

ScowardNJ · #7 09-09-2019, 09:41 PM

Those are some quality aquarium escapees!! Never knew half of those fish were swimming around down there!!

AndyS · #8 09-10-2019, 09:08 AM

Nice mixed bag from Fahloridah !!

Esox Luciano · #9 09-10-2019, 12:23 PM

Great report dude & even better pics! Nice catches all around, even that Larry looks good! Those knife fish look pretty awesome! Checked out your post in the slatwater section as well. Looks like you straight killed it down there considering your time amd the weather. Well done bro!!!

Chrisper4694 · #10 09-10-2019, 01:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigfishy

Well done as always... lots of exotics/invasives..
shoulda kept the iguana...
I here there beyond infested down there..

that was probably the biggest one i saw but, no joke, i honestly probably saw dozens every few yards. I wouldn't be surprised if we drove by hundreds of them easily! I think pretty much everything is invasive down there haha. My buddy says there are monkeys all around to but we didn't see them that day.