In between dreams of outwitting a world-record bonefish, landing a washtub-size permit or outbattling the first 200-pound tarpon in the history of their sport, Florida fly fishermen need some steady nourishment to keep their reflexes in tune and their spirits up. As a fly fisherman's meat and potatoes, you could hardly dish out anything to improve on the redfish.

In salt water there are plenty of critters, from pinfish to sailfish, that will gobble up a fly on occasion--many of them on frequent occasion. Still, none can quite match the redfish when it comes to the near-perfect combination of gaminess, widespread shallow-water availability, and general willingness to sample an offering of hair or feathers. It's a trifecta of attributes that has of late earned the handsome species more flyfishing attention than any other Florida fish.

Of course, wide distribution is the starting point to earning that kind of popularity. As the crow is said to fly, the mouths of Florida's two east-west boundary rivers--the St. Mary's on the Atlantic shore and the Perdido on the Gulf Panhandle--lie about 350 miles apart. However, if some ambitious Georgia crow were to defy his alleged straight-line instincts and decide to make the trip by following all the nooks and crannies of Florida's Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coastlines, he would arrive at the Alabama line too conked to caw, having flapped for about 8,000 miles.

One of the very few things that virtually all those watery miles have in common is the redfish, referred to along more northerly portions of the Atlantic Seaboard as the red drum. If you read old books you may also have seen it called the "channel bass," which is a particularly inappropriate name to those who chase the fish with a fly, because they hunt for action over flats and oyster bars and along tidal shorelines, in some of the shallowest waters that could possibly float a decent fish.

No telling when the first red was caught on a fly, or where. The original victim was possibly done in elsewhere, but if it did fall prey to a fly in Florida, it was probably part of a mixed bag somewhere along the upper half of the Atlantic Coast. Fly fishing, after all, is the oldest form of rod-and-reeling, and fly fishermen have always been adventuresome, to say nothing of slightly nutty. If it swims, he will go for it, and the occasional flyfisher who ventured this far south early in the century, or before the turn of it, was certainly no exception.

As a modern and full-fledged sport, however, casting to redfish by sight developed in the Florida Keys shortly before and after World War II as a spinoff from bonefishing. On some flats in Florida Bay, guides and anglers began spotting "bonefish" with strange dark tails, sometimes protruding high enough above the surface to expose a black spot at the base. They were not bonefish at all, of course, but redfish. Maybe some visiting anglers were tempted to call them "channel bass" but how could they say such a thing about a fish rooting around in bare inches of water?

Once over their surprise, those pioneering anglers were pleased to discover that these redfish would succumb to the same baits and tactics used for bonefish, but with one glaring difference: The redfish succumbed much more readily. In fact, they often appeared eagerly cooperative, even with anglers throwing flies--a trait you would never find listed on the resume of a bonefish. And so they remain today--not only in Florida Bay but all over the state, where the history of shallow-water redfishing is far shorter than it is in the Keys. Believe it or not, less than 20 years have passed since substantial numbers of anglers on either coast of Central and North Florida "discovered" that redfish could be routinely found on skinny flats in their own angling neighborhoods and that, moreover, those fish are just as willing to gobble up flies as they are to gulp jigs, spoons or plugs; frequently, even more willing.

No great mystery surrounds that belated discovery. How could anglers have realized what delights those shallows might hold for them when they had theretofore shunned such water like the plague in order to avoid grounding? Today, however, Florida Bay has plenty of challengers as Florida's leading grounds for flyrod redfishing--among them, the 10,000 Islands, Tampa Bay, Charlotte Harbor, Homosassa and the Big Bend, various Panhandle Bays and, on the Atlantic side, the Indian River, Mosquito Lagoon and the bays and marshes of the northeastern coast. Check a map and you'll find that list doesn't leave very much of coastal Florida unaccounted for.

To find redfish in fly situations, you obviously look for the shallow-water conditions they prefer. Beyond argument, the easiest and best approach to that little task is to engage a guide, of which good ones are up for hire in all the territories noted in the preceding paragraph and many more. The pro not only knows where to look for the fish but also does his best to make sure that you approach them from the most promising casting angle and are well-coached in the upcoming procedures. Often as not, the coaching degenerates from gentle lecturing before a fish is sighted, into Butkus-like bullying after they swim into view. Fortunately, the fly rodder is generally too excited by that time to pay much attention and so mayhem is avoided.

On second thought, there is an approach even better than hiring a guide--go out with a buddy who is one of the countless enthusiastic and experienced Florida amateurs who own top-quality flats boats and peripheral equipment. In addition to professional gear, he probably knows the local haunts of redfish about as well as local guides, and may possibly be thinking about turning pro himself. This makes him better than a full-fledged guide because he doesn't charge you anything. Of course, he may not yet have developed the ultimate talent in guiding, which is the ability to wring a decent cast out of a customer by means of browbeating alone. But how much can you expect for nothing?

Lacking such a buddy, or the willingness to engage professional guidance, boat owners can start their personal search for good flyfishing grounds by simply sneaking into watershallower than they have previously been probing. How shallow? Well, it's better if the hull doesn't drag bottom too often. To pick a good average depth out of a hat, two feet is fine. Much deeper, you'll have considerable trouble spotting fish in the water unless it's exceptionally clear. Neither will wakes and other surface disturbances be as easy to make out. And if you hope to throw flies at tailing fish, you'll nearly always have to go even skimpier than that.

Unfortunately, there is more to the riddle than depth alone. Huge expanses of flats contain no reds at all--or much of anything else. To thin out your search pattern, look for areas with hard bottom--rock, shell or live oysters. If the hard stuff is abundant but well scattered over softer bottom, that can be even better.

Florida Bay--the area where all this got started--is, paradoxically, the major exception to the hard-bottom rule in all of Florida. The reason is that there just isn't any hard bottom in Florida Bay. But there is plenty of redfish food hiding in the grass and silt, and so the fish have made an exception.