Flounder are the main target, but an occasional redfish may come to the boat.

Pete Thliveros doesn’t get overly excited about a fish. In fact, I once watched him sight-fish an 11-pound bass from a bed in Rodman Pool, and even after the fish was on, he was as calm and methodical as a surgeon in an operating room.

That’s a pretty good trait for a full-time professional bass angler, which is what the 44-year-old Jacksonville native, called Peter T (as he is universally known) has been since 1987. It may also explain why he has been quite successful at it; winning several major championships, earning ten BASSMASTER Classic berths, while becoming one of only 25 anglers to achieve more than $1 million in tournament winnings.

Calm is good. But at the moment, Peter T wasn’t quite as composed as usual, because this one particular flounder had been eating his lunch, so to speak.

“If bass were this tough I’d be broke,” he muttered, as he inspected his fourth mangled mud minnow.

Peter T is not easily deterred, so flipping a fresh minnow back under the dock, he eased it to the spot where the finicky flounder had been seriously depleting our supply of baitfish.

“There he is again,” he said, as he dropped his rodtip slightly. “He’s just sitting there mouthing it. Come on...eat it...move with it!”

Watching Peter T get excited and frustrated about a fish is kinda fun. During the almost 20 years I’ve known him, it hasn’t happened often. But when he finally stuck that 2-pound flounder and put it in the boat, his grin was probably bigger than when he landed that 11-pound bass.

Peter T has a thing about flounder. He pursues them with a passion.

“I have been fascinated by flounder ever since I was a little kid growing up in Jacksonville,” he says. “When I was a youngster I was fishing salt water from piers, beaches, any shoreline I could reach, and occasionally from a boat. I didn’t get into bass fishing until I was a teenager. One of the things that really captured my attention was when my mom would take me to the pier for the day, and I got to watch guys fish for flounder.”

“They were using floats,” he says, “and you could watch the float go down, then come back up, then go down again, and then come back up. Flounder are not easy to catch on live bait, but these guys knew when to set the hook. They could ‘feel’ when it was time, and that made flounder a special fish for me. Even as a 10-year-old kid, that was a challenge I wanted to master. I’ve been pursuing them ever since.”

So much so, that he set up a second boat just for inshore saltwater fishing. And, when he is not on the pro bass tour fishing for Team Crown Royal, you’ll find him prowling First Coast waters. During summer months, that normally means he is specifically targeting flounder, because that is when they are most abundant from Fernandina to Matanzas Inlet.

June signals the start of prime flounder fishing along the First Coast, and it will continue until the first cold snaps of the fall. In some areas the start of the “run” is totally predictable. I can count on flounder invading the St. Augustine Inlet basin, and stacking up in Salt Run, just by looking at the calendar. The same holds true at Mayport, and from those areas the flounder tend to spread throughout the Intracoastal Waterway and St. Johns River for the summer. And spread out they do.

During 15 years spent as a bass guide in the Lake George area, I could count on catching flounder in Little Lake George (near Welaka) during June and July. As the crow flies, that’s over 70 miles up the St. Johns River from the Mayport jetties (even more as flounders swim). I have no idea whether those fish live there year-round and only bite during the summer, or whether they make a mad dash from Mayport to get there in time to eat my lures. But, they were consistent enough that I caught them regularly on plastic worms and jigs while guiding for bass—and there are a couple of bars and drops where I could actually target them with a fair chance of success.

More than a few other bass fishermen in the St. Johns River have nabbed a flounder or two while bouncing a plastic worm for bass. In fact, when it comes to cashing in on the summer flounder run, Peter T may climb into his saltwater boat, but he is basically going “bass fishing.”