He hopes to land something before the storm hits.Īt that moment, in their headquarters in West Palm Beach, SFWMD meteorologists are monitoring their own weather stations and screens, anticipating the rain, helping the staff operate the canal system and more than 2,000 automated remote facilities to handle it. Thunderclouds are building to the immediate west, and he has just glanced a weather radar map on his smart-phone. Cimbaro and others tending canals and waterways have to deal with the world as it is, not as anyone or everyone might like it to be. Many of the fish swimming among them are invasive, too, including the Mayan cichlid and tilapia and oscar, exotics illegally introduced by humanity. We spend a lot of money controlling all of them.” Torpedo grass, that’s bad, too, and water lettuce and water hyacinth. “Invasive plants aren’t as good, except this one. “Native vegetation, like eel grass, is the best for fishing habitat,” he says. He is casting close along the canal’s edges, through shallows thick with weeds. Cimbaro would be happy, now, with just one. In one of them, the L-67A in Water Conservation Area 3 in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, anglers have been known to haul in 100 bass in a single day. Especially in spring and in dry periods, he says, fish swarm into canals. He knows more than most about fishing the region’s canals and ponds and other waterways. Cimbaro heads the FWC’s local Fish Management Area program and writes The City Fisher, an authoritative, widely circulated quarterly newsletter. Whomever they might please or dismay, canals are fertile for fish, and for fishermen and women. And sharing the outdoors with family, that’s as good as it gets on this earth.” “I have to have some peace and quiet with a lot of green around me. “I relax on my computer a lot, but to really rest I have to get out in the outdoors,” he says. He can also share a naturalist’s passion. “We can’t go back to that, not all the way,” he says. Cimbaro can gaze south and west and easily envision the seemingly endless sheet of water that once spilled from the southern lip of Lake Okeechobee down through Loxahatchee and Big Cypress, recharging the Everglades. A breeze is just starting to ruffle the water.įrom the bank, Mr. Just then, he is casting a Beetle Spin lure with a rubber jig into the shimmering Earman River Canal (C-17), where it joins Lake Catherine in Palm Beach Gardens, hoping for sunfish. He has seen the advantages of canals and the effects of environmental damage and human waste, too. Property owners fight even the suggestion that they give up anything of theirs for the long-term good.Īs a fisheries biologist with the South Regional Office of the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), based in West Palm Beach, John Cimbaro has viewed canal-anglers many times has, in fact, BEEN one, every day that he can. While environmentalists decry nearly a century of damage to fragile South Florida wetlands and rivers, anglers - often allies - resist efforts to backfill fisher-friendly canals to restore them. Needs and wants collide even more dramatically now in days of drawing lines and taking sides. Try calling a public meeting over plans to widen or narrow or dig or fill any canal. They remain crucial distribution links, ways of shipping water to where people need and want it they have bent, also and with the culture, toward the green-and-clean.Ĭanals carry a heavy load, hydrological and political. The Tamiami Canal from the western Everglades to Miami, built from 1915 to 1928, and four main drainage canals (West Palm, Hillsboro, North New River and Miami) and their many feeders turned vast portions of swamp and wetlands into sugar cane and rice fields and housing and shopping developments and roadways. Modern canals, at first, were a blunt, naive assertion of human power. Nature doesn’t make mixed concrete or asphalt or steel pipe or cable, but it is very good at waterways, at building and shaping them, swamping and parching them, narrowing and spreading them. Fresh water keeps flowing, managers keep working to discipline and direct it, and conservationists keep asking how and why and when … when efforts to restore nature’s balance will tip back toward the wild side.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |