Just got back from fishing Florida while on vacation

Would have spent the whole time fishing but had to do the husband thing with my wife..BORING but she is a great gal and I owe it to her for putting up with me for 30 years so I pretended to be interested in art and shopping with her. (She would point something she liked out and I would smile and nod while I was really thinking of the next spot I wanted to fish.) Did get some good fishing in obviously. Got a bucket list species and a surprise species as well!

Tried the salt water in the keys. Saw a bunch of snook, sight cast to a dozen 4' long Tarpon and a few sharks but nothing would bite artificials. Went with light line, cut bait and small hooks. Caught a bunch of small mangrove snapper one after the other as soon as the bait hit the water only 3 keepers (They are TASTY!). Would have loved catching a tarpon from kayak.

A pic is worth a thousand words right so here ya go.

Looks like you had a great time!

wow

Awesome! I like the freshwater part of your trip best thanks for sharing

Congratulations on your trip. Florida is a great place to fish inshore, offshore, and freshwater. The clown knifefish is beautiful. What did you catch it on?

Where did you catch the clown fish?

Awesome post and some nice fish. Good job.

I was using shiners for the Knife fish. 1/8oz pinch weight . to keep it down and slow paddled by the weed lines near the channels. Caught 6-7 all close to this size and had a few more that got off. It was amazing. That was the biggest Peacock and largemouth but even the small peacocks fight HARD!

Peacock bass is on my short list, wish they would stock some lakes here in Texas with them.

Might get too cold in N Texas. But they have Tilapia in some lakes south and if they live surely peacocks would. Would be cool.

Would they stock in Fayette?

Peacock bass even suffer some substantial losses from cold water in South Florida. I lived there 20 years, and saw the population build and get decimated more than once. Dade County was more hospitable to them than even Broward or Palm Beach - they were that close to the edge of frequent cold-weather kill-off. So, I'd say Texas is a no-go. Trust me, any lake stocked with Tilapia should result in a criminal charge against those who dumped the invasive species. They WILL displace native sunfish. Oscars are far worse, and slimy as a monster in ghostbusters.

I saw a hundred tilapia on beds walking the canals. I thought to myself how easy it would be for a bow fisherman. I saw Mayan cichlids and tilapia but no bluegills or sunfish not that you mention it Flippin-Out.

Yes, it would be easy to shoot a few of them. With the hundreds of miles of canals available as habitat, 100,000 of them wouldn't be missed. It was a sad loss to lose the bluegill that used to be just about everywhere. The tilapia are so dominant no other similar species can survive in their presence.

It is odd because tilapia eat most plants and bluegill eat mostly little live things. Maybe because tilapia get bigger so once grown they have no predators while the gills are eaten by bass and peacocks and everything else. they cannot compete with the breeding of the tilapia. Just my hypothesis.

There are still lots of shad. I saw several peacocks between inches and 2 lbs swimming among the tilapia beds. I am sure they were waiting for the little guys to hatch and would go in kill mode on the fry.

I want to go back real bad...