Snake-Charmer

Florida snakeheads strike fear in some anglers and opportunity in others

By Charlie Levine

January 2, 2024

As I pull into a public park on the western edge of Broward county, the sun is just peeking over the clusters of two-story McMansions that stop abruptly where the wilds of Florida take over. Corey Nowakowski is sitting in the driver’s seat of the only other vehicle in the parking lot. The world-record snakehead angler rolls down the window of his Toyota Tacoma to say hello. The “snakehead slayer” sticker on the rear window of his truck and the 10-foot jonboat sticking out past the tailgate gave him away.

My glasses instantly fog up as I step out of my truck and into the muggy, August morning. Nowakowski, a 34-year-old native Floridian, invites me into his truck, and we drive a mile or two down the road before he pulls off by a small bridge. We slide the boat out of the pickup and down an embankment to a manmade canal. We load in a cooler, trolling motor and battery. A half-dozen rods are held in place on the bench seats with Velcro. Before we take off down the canal, Nowakowski parks his truck tight to a row of tall bushes so it’s less visible from the road.

The trolling motor quietly pushes us west until we hit another bridge that leads to a canal flowing north and south. The bridge is too low for us to pass. Nowakowski lets me out and runs the boat a little closer to the bridge, but it’s a steep takeout. We remove the equipment and pull the boat up the incline. The sun is hardly up, and my “moisture-wicking” clothes are soaked in sweat, even though Nowakowski does much of the work. He’s wiry yet strong. We move the boat to the larger canal, reload the gear and slide it back into the water.

“What’s the name of this canal?” I ask. He pauses and looks around.

“I’m not really sure,” he says. “I don’t think it has a name; it’s just part of flood control.”

I don’t believe him, but I also don’t want to press. I would later learn that it took him years to find this place on the edge of the swamp, and he doesn’t want to ruin it. So I go along.

He asks if I prefer a baitcaster or a spinning rod. I take the spinner, which I’m more comfortable with. I’m surprised by the stoutness of the rod and the size of the reel. This isn’t typical largemouth tackle. The heavy-action rod doesn’t flex much as I cast the 3500-size spinning reel loaded with 65-pound braid. The drag is cranked down. We’ll need that power to pull on the predators lurking in the shade by the banks.

We work our way north, and I’m constantly shaken by the grapefruit-size pond apples that sound like mortars when they fall into the water. Gators pop up in front of us and behind. We’re in their world, and we’re vastly outnumbered. “It’s the small gators you need to watch out for,” Nowakowski says. “They’re way more aggressive, and they will inspect the soft-plastic, topwater frogs we’ll be using.” Nowakowski makes these frogs with his father, Eddie. Their legs kick up a nice wake as they “paddle” across the surface.

Our intended quarry is the bullseye snakehead, a devilish creature that appears to have swam out of a Stan Lee comic book. These fish have a wide, flat head and a long body accompanied by long anal and pectoral fins, red eyes like a werewolf and gnarly jaws. They are pure muscle and can breathe air. Their explosive strikes will make you flinch, even when you’re expecting them. The fish’s temperament is straight-up nasty, but you need to be nasty to survive in this environment.

The snakeheads are coming off a spawn, and they’re moody. Snakeheads protect their fry, so when we see the ripples of juveniles on the surface, we cast in that direction. The fish actively feed at various times during the day, but Nowakowski says he’s never been able to work out exactly what time of day is best. They aren’t like the more predictable largemouth. But if anyone were to figure it out, it’d be Nowakowski.

He caught his first snakehead in 2001 fishing for peacock bass in Margate, Florida. It’s generally thought that snakeheads were brought to the United States from Southeast Asia as a food source. Despite their looks, they’re surprisingly good to eat. While snakeheads in Florida are resilient, they’re very susceptible to cold water, as opposed to the northern snakeheads in the Mid-Atlantic. Snakehead populations in Florida for the most part are contained to Broward County but have started to expand into neighboring Palm Beach County.

“They’ve definitely spread out,” Nowakowski says, and they’ve gotten larger. “They’re getting bigger because back in the day, we weren’t catching world-record fish.” He landed his first world record in 2012, a 12-pounder. He has since held the record seven times. His current world record is a 15½-pounder landed in 2021.

He’s an expert marksman with a baitcaster and skips his frog into tight openings that most anglers wouldn’t attempt for fear of snagging. I’m just getting the hang of how to work the frogs, which sink if you don’t keep them moving, when Nowakowski comes tight to a fish that bolts across the canal and jumps like a tarpon, shaking its head like a windshield wiper in a thunderstorm.

Setting the hook on a snakehead is like driving steel into a boulder. I don’t connect on my first couple of strikes. I throw the dark-purple frog to the edge of a stump when a fish piles on the lure the second it hits the water. I yank hard and come tight to an angry snakehead that jets for structure. Nowakowski moves the boat to keep my line from tangling with the motor on the transom as I pull the fish away from the banks to deeper water. As the fish begins its death roll next to the boat, he scoops it up with the net. I’m shocked by the fish’s length and weight, 9 pounds, for such a tight waterway. Not bad for my first snakehead. A 10-pounder is considered a trophy.

We continue to throw the frogs, which have the color pattern of a cichlid, another non-native species that snakeheads eat, though these fish will eat just about anything. The best fishing, Nowakowski says, is April through May and September through October when post-spawn fish are extra aggressive.

When we come to a fork in the canal at about lunchtime, we decide to work our way back. The action slows, but I keep casting, hoping for one more bite. Nowakowski doesn’t take many people to this spot, and I want to make the most of it. As we amble along, we spy giant gizzard shad, osprey, hawks, iguanas and more gators. He tells me he likes the wild of the place, which is ironic since the canal is manmade.

We find our way back to the takeout, and I make a final cast toward moving water. The frog disappears, and a snakehead kicks up a wake like an alligator. This is the fish I came for. I pull the rod away from the structure, then reel hard as the snakehead comes directly at the boat and bounces off the side before taking line as it steams down the canal, despite the heavy drag. The fish is ferocious. I can hardly contain my excitement. Expletives fly. In the heat of the moment, Nowakowski nets the monster, and we collect ourselves. Eleven pounds. A last-cast fish I will not soon forget.