Fishtales
January 5, 1998
Ron Brooks and a friend have one of those days - the kind of day you like to remember fishing a canal in the Everglades.
Everglades Bass
Ron Brooks
L-28 canal runs north from the Tamiami Trail, US 41, about 40 miles west of Miami beginning just past what we call the 40-mile bend. After 40 miles of due west travel, the road bends to the northwest toward Ochopee and Chokoloskee.
L-28 takes off due north from the canal paralleling US 41 and, like most of the canals in the South Florida Everglades, was dug during the early land boom in an effort to drain the glades. A large dyke formed from digging the canal borders the east bank for about 8 miles, where the canal ends. The canal itself is about 15 feet wide and 15 feet deep, cut through the solid coral rock, which forms the foundation for all of the everglades.
Although cut through in many places now, the dyke actually acted as an impoundment device, holding the water level at about two or three feet in the grass to the east. The west side of the canal was comparatively dry, actually walkable most of the time. We walked up snipe and roosted spring turkeys in the evening for a next morning hunt on the west side and found wood ducks and teal over the dyke to the east. Many times we would duck hunt at day break, bass fish until mid-day, walk up snipe in the afternoon, and then try to roost a turkey in a cypress head late in the afternoon for a return trip the next morning.
At the north end where the canal apparently ends, the dyke continues into the glades. The canal takes up again, this time on the east side of the dyke and runs for another 7 or 8 miles to a dead end in the heart of the western Everglades. It was as if the digging crew just decided to swap sides.
It is this second canal that drew so much of my attention. The only way to fish it is from a boat, and the only way to get a boat into it is to travel the first 7 miles, and then drag the boat over the dyke. Airboats can get you there, but they are marginal fishing platforms at best.
This particular day my partner, Sam, and I were in my 12 foot Jon boat with all our tackle and a 15 horse motor. This sounds fine until you know that Sam weighed in at about 400 pounds. We had about 3 inches of freeboard sitting still in the water. We had launched the boat over the guardrail on US 41 and then ran to the end of the first canal without even wetting a line. The drag over was a real pain, but we managed it and were now in the second canal.
You have to picture the fact that we were in a 7-mile long 15 feet wide ditch that very possibly had only seen a handful of fishermen. To our dismay, we did not get strike on anything from daybreak until about 12 noon. It was noon when we drifted past some cypress trees on the east bank in about 3 feet on water. The small gar were thick back in the trees, snipping at the surface with their snout.
I had not caught a fish and as we are apt to do on days like this, I began to devise a way to snag something – anything! I took a treble off the back of one of my topwaters, and tied it on my line with a worm weight. I began casting back in the trees and trying to snag one of the gar, with no success. Sitting there watching the treble in the water 2 feet or so under the surface, I began jigging it up and down in a bored stupor.
From out of no where, a small bass attacked the treble. A fish!! My day was made!! I took him off and tried it again. Another bass!! Then, another and another! Suddenly the water came to life. You could sense movement and activity. We both began throwing black firetail worms, but nothing would pick them up.
One of my casts ended up on a lily pad, and I began to drag it off into the water. As the firetail dangled over the side of the pad, a bass erupted on it. Sam did the same thing, this time deliberately with the same result. We did this firetail/lily pad pattern for almost two hours, catching 62 bass between us. The largest, a seven pounder, was caught by Sam. It was a poor fish, very thin, with the head of at least a ten pounder. But, this was the heat of the summer in July, and South Florida bass get that way in the summer.
It ended as quickly as it began, almost as if someone turned a switch off. Here we were, in mid-July in the South Florida Everglades, in 90% humidity and 90-degree heat, catching more bass on one trip than Sam had ever thought possible. As is the case with most trips like this, we had no camera, and no witnesses. But we have our memories of that day. We don’t get together as often as we did, usually just every few years. But every time we do, one us always says to the other, “remember the time out on L-28…….? “
