The highest point in Florida is Britton Hill at 345 feet above sea level, way up in Walton County in the Panhandle.  The average elevation in Houston is 80 feet above sea level, so 345 feet is pretty high. I suspect I’d have to worry about altitude sickness. Florida’s mean elevation is 100 feet.  The low point is the Atlantic Ocean which is, oddly enough, at sea level.

What that means–and I know this from recent experience with our own Hurricane Harvey–when it rains in Florida the water doesn’t necessarily drain. It sits. If it rains fast enough (and in Florida sometimes I’m guessing it rains fast enough) it piles up. To get stuff to drain you have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements.  I bet in Denver they don’t have to spend a lot of money on drainage improvements. We do here in Houston. I bet they do in Florida.

So there is the South Florida Water Management District.  It oversees 2100 miles of freshwater and brackish canals in south Florida.  Then there are secondary canals run by cities and counties and water control districts. In South Florida there are a lot of canals that exist to move water in flat land where water don’t move.

In 1984 florida introduced peacock bass into the southern canals, both to create a game fishery and to add an aggressive fish that could control the other weird fish, and there’s some weird fish. According to the internet there are

Peacock Bass (photo from Wikipedia), baby tarpon, largemouth bass, grass carp, tilapia, snook,

oscars (from Wikipedia), jaguar guapote, Mayan cichlid, black acacia, clown knife fish,

snakehead (from Wikipedia). I have heard estimates that as many as 80 species live in the canals. Folk have to dump their aquariums somewhere.

Snakehead make excellent eating, but it may be an urban myth that you can’t catch and release.

It is somewhat of a thing in Florida to traipse or kayak along the canals to fly fish for exotics. In July Kris and I saw a presentation at Texas Flyfishers of Houston (which is sort of like the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or the Texas Rangers of Arlington), by Jim Gray of the Austin Fly Fishers, on fishing the canals.  We walked out not intrigued so much as disgusted.  These were some ugly fish.

People fish these canals like I fish for black bass, with 6-8 weights and streamers, and I thought that maybe next week in West Palm we would look for a canal to fish. I chickened out and hired a guide.  I still thought maybe we would squeeze in an hour or so, and I asked the guide about them.  “Fire ants” he said, “moccasins” he said. “Be careful.”

Now honestly, I’ve been bit enough by fire ants to know their misery and its limits, and I have just as good a chance of moccasins hereabouts as I might have in Florida. Still, they’re ugly fish. We’re fishing salt water.