Hello I’m new here and I’m posting due to some frustration from something that occurred two days ago. I got back into fishing about 6 weeks back, first time since I was a teenager. I’ve been out everyday these 6 weeks and only just found a decent location two days ago. Broke my dry spell and was catching LMB and peacocks, 2-3lbers.
Now I want to first paint a picture here. This was a park in south Florida with a small narrow canal on one side and a small lake/canal on the other. The small narrow canal has bushes where I was but the further end of it is clear. I was standing in the small clearing between the bushes.
Entire park is about 1 mile from side to side. When I arrived there were two guys fishing near the entrance, so I walked to the far other end away from them so I wasn’t fishing on top of them. I ended up going to the small narrow canal on the opposite side of the park from them, and after a few catches I noticed several pretty big peacocks that were spawning. The biggest easily being 10lbs, biggest peacock I’ve seen in person.
so I spent a good 15 minutes working my senko and I was getting hits and having it chase but never hooking. After about 30 minutes total in this one narrow small spot the 2 guys from before walk up, now with an additional 3 guys, and crowd around either side of me and start trying to catch them too. I mean literally on top of me shoulder to shoulder. It wasn’t a large area at all. Honestly it was barley enough for even two people to stand in and fish comfortably. I decided I would stand my ground and never stop casting and this upset them, they had the audacity to tell ME to go away as if I was the one intruding.
Here’s the part that really gets me. They were using shiners. Just planting them directly in the nest. You’re all but guaranteed a catch at that point. Had it been a lure, okay at least then it’s just a matter of who has better luck/skill. But it was akin to shooting them in a barrel.
I didn’t think much of it and figured whatever they’ll catch it, release and be on their way and then I’ll have my space to cast and catch it after, not a huge deal.
Then after catching the 10 pounder the guy knifes the fish in the head and harvests it. Then they do it again, and again, and again and harvest every spawning peacock going over the bag limit. 10+ fish into their bucket.
What should or could I have even said to make them give me my space? They could have at minimum easily waited for me to catch and release and then harvested it after. They were gone before FWC would have been able to show up and do anything.
I wanna clear up potential confusion. I don’t necessarily have an issue with harvesting if someone’s following regs. But I find it a little crappy to harvest a huge nesting game fish/management species. But that’s neither here nor there, my main issue is them standing all on top of me and basically screwing me out of the catch spent time working on. It was crappy and they know what they were doing, I have no clue what I was supposed to say. I can easily foresee them responding bad to anything there is to say like “oh well you don’t own the water.” It was just super messed up.
also, these are not invasive at least in this area. They’re considered “Introduced nonnative” and are a management species to help keep actually detrimental invasives such as carp or snakehead under control. Removing the bigger ones is heavily discouraged by the FWC because of this. Harvesting them causes more harm than good. But again my biggest problem is idk how to deal with a situation like this, then trying to bully me out of my spot and just fishing on top of it.
