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What to Fish for in February
 The exodus of anglers to the waters of Florida is in full flood during the month of February. Those, however, who have been annually angling visitors to that State and go solely to indulge in their favorite pastime, postpone their visits until the latter part of March and the month of April, for it is then that all species of game fish and many of the most beautiful of the richly colored semi-tropical species are in the greatest profusion. It requires neither skill nor experience to fill a boat with them if the proper feeding grounds are fished.While the interior portion of the State is full of lakes, large and small, but few Northern fishermen visit them solely for fishing. These waters contain large numbers of large-mouthed black bass, warmouthed bass, strawberry bass, a species peculiar to the South, sunfish of many varieties and an indigenous pickerel, closely allied to the Northern and Eastern pond pickerel, not the big one so-called East of the Alleghanies. While usually ignored by the angling tourist these fresh waters present many attractions for the rod. The black bass run very large—a weight of thirty pounds has been reached—and on a plane with their big-mouthed brethren of Northern and Western waters, they are apt to show widely different traits when lighting for liberty. In some Florida waters they leap wildly into the air when hooked; in others they come tamely to the net, with their great mouths wide open and in a drowned condition. They are identical in species with our Northern variety.
All along the Eastern and Gulf Coasts of Florida there are rivers and streams that flow down to the salt waters. In all of these the black bass is found, and the flowing current seems to give them an added fighting strain to that possessed by their congeners of the more quiet waters. Here they are found at their best in the extreme upper waters, among the lily pads and in the dense growth of other water vegetation, to boat one safely from which requires the skill and experience of years.
The charm of fishing these waters of the down-flowing streams, is not, however, confined to catching the black bass. In nearly all of them, particularly in the month of April, they are visited by great shoals of migratory and predatory fish that come in on the earlv flood-tide to feed upon smaller fish, particularly the young of the menhaden, so called in that section, and it is not an infrequent sight to see the water tossed into foam, over more than an acre in area, by the onslaught of the big fish upon the dense schools of the smaller ones.
The red drum or channel bass can be taken freely in the river waters on the troll—the phantom minnow seeming to be the favorite lure—and frequently reaches a weight of twenty to thirty pounds. Occasionally one has been taken on a large gaudy fly, as also have been the salt water trout under like conditions. There is an angler who spends every winter on the East coast of Florida, who never uses any lure except the feathers, and seems to be very successful with them. My own experience, however, has been scant in that direction, probably because I wanted clear water where a surface fly could be used, feeling no doubt to the extreme, that to use a sunken one was merely bait-fishing.
In these streams the black bass frequently come down to the brackish waters, but, in my experience, it rather dulls them as fighters, the reverse being the case below the mouth of the Susquehanna River, where the water is at times brackish, and when found there these fish seem to have taken on greater fighting powers than they show in the upper fresh waters of that river. In the little bays and widenings of the Florida streams, the strawberry bass, locally called in many places the “spotted bass,” gives considerable sport on light tackle, frequently accentuated by hooking a large channel bass, which will be death to your gear, if you do not have plenty of line and know how to serve your reel and rod. pacific salmon on the fly.
From time to time the local papers of the Pacific Coast have published accounts of the salmon of those waters being caught on artificial flies. These statements have never been substantiated. Why these fish do not feed on the surface, like their Atlantic congeners, have puzzled the most experienced of anglers, and the solution is quite as perplexing as the whys and wherefores of the hooked nose of the salmon developed on the approach and during the spawning season. An inquiry has reached the Outing office concerning the taking of Pacific salmon on an artificial fly, and although assured that a pure ancorhyneus had never been so taken, the matter was referred to the California Fish Commission for consideration.
“While I have heard that such has been done, and it was noted as an unusual occurrence, I have not been able to verify any of the stories. Thousands of salmon are caught with a spoon in Monterey and San Francisco bay, and occasionally they are taken near the headwaters of the Sacramento in the same way. “I am inclined to your view of it, that in the cases reported it has been the steelhead trout that were taken. As I have seen specimens of those fish that weighed twenty pounds, and they hear such a close resemblance to the salmon, it is easy to confuse the two, and a great many steelheads are taken with a fly, especially the small ones.” This subject is an interesting one and merits further investigation.
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