Targeting peacock bass in Miami is not a wilderness experience. Photo by Jeff Christopher.

There's that one wonderful moment -- that titillating second of the unknown -- when you ponder exactly what is at the end of your line.

In these waters, it could be a largemouth bass or a hard-charging snook or even a tarpon. This time, it's a bass, all right -- a peacock bass that fights and struggles with a frenetic, primitive energy genetically born in the dark waters of South America's Amazon River basin.

It battles with an intensity and endurance any smallmouth bass would admire. It skirts the surface of the water -- a colorful blur -- before suddenly diving and ripping off line against the pull of the drag. It doesn't even give up fighting when lipped and lifted into the boat.

Such an encounter is worth remembering, the very experience that wealthy Americans have long traveled to exotic locales like Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia to pursue. But this is Miami, of all places, and we're tangling with the only population of peacock bass in the continental United States.

It is hardly the wilderness experience usually associated with the coveted game fish, however. Houses, condominiums and apartment buildings dominate the landscape. Trash floats on the water and lies scattered along the shoreline. The air is alive with the sounds of nature -- urban nature, that is: car horns, mufflers in need of repair, a lawnmower, and children playing in the distance.

This is the unlikely home of the peacock bass, commonly considered one of the top 10 game fish in the world!

The freshwater, water-control canals in Dade and southern Broward counties are home to the most unique urban fishing experience in the entire country.

In a bold experiment in 1984, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission stocked 20,000 peacock fingerlings into a 1,200-mile canal system that intersects one of South Florida's most heavily populated areas. After nurturing this unusual fishery for five years, the FWCC made peacock bass a legal game fish in 1989. Both the multicolored species and the fishermen in this region have responded in grand fashion.

"The fishery continues to sustain itself, and they are increasing in the maximum size of the fish being caught and the number of larger fish," says Paul Shafland, a FWCC biologist and the father of the peacock project. "By larger fish, I am referring to fish 3 to 6 pounds. There are more and more of those fish being caught.

"It has certainly exceeded the economic impact that we anticipated. It provides somewhere in the ballpark of $8 million a year for the local economy. And that's a conservative estimate. These canals get far more pressure than even Lake Okeechobee. We're talking 100 to 300 hours per acre of fishing in the canals, compared to Okeechobee where the most it has ever had is two hours."