Capt. Jim Bradley, better known as Big Daddy in his home waters off Weeki Wachee, was giving me the stink eye as I slid off the gunnel into 10 feet of water over one of his choice summer holes--a small sand patch that from the surface looked more like a white dishpan lying on the dark grassy bottom.

"There's grouper down there for sure," growled Bradley, "and they ain't gonna bite if you swim through them taking pictures."

But with 10 keeper gags in the box and another dozen shorts released earlier in the day, I was intent on witnessing one of these patches close-up to confirm Bradley's description of "...small rock outcropping where current and grouper fins have washed the sand from beneath and created a small ledge. The white patch is the washed sand right in front of that little ledge."

Sure enough, as my eyes were drawn to the tiny bright underwater beach, several gag grouper swam from the sandy patch, high-finning it away from my clicking camera. The biggest surprise was that after I climbed back aboard the boat, we landed two more keepers to finish a day spent slugging it out with midsummer gags.

Each sandy patch we stopped at produced grouper, almost always on the first drop, attesting to Bradley's formula--white patch plus dark bottom divided by 10 feet of warm summer water equals grouper.

Finding good bottom has always been the secret to finding good grouper fishing, and in the waters off Citrus and Hernando counties, there is hardly anything but good bottom.

For most grouper diggers, spring and late fall are peak grouper-catching seasons, and by the time August doldrums set in, the few well-known areas of hard bottom and wrecks that dot the shallow, sandy depths of the Gulf have been pounded so hard that grouper are in short supply. With the advent of inexpensive lorans, these popular numbers continue to get pressure throughout the summer as they become known to more and more anglers. Experienced anglers have learned to avoid them, looking instead for little-known areas where fleets of grouper fishermen are seldom seen. Trolling lures is one way to locate these rarely fished patches, but given the enormity of the Gulf, anglers might troll for hours before a strike.

Bradley's method of running on plane and watching for white patches is quicker and more efficient and works well for locating concentrations of grouper from Suwannee to Port Richey. South of there, the Gulf bottom is not much more than a vast sandy desert, with occasional structures that are heavily fished.

Given the traditional formula of one foot of depth for each mile out in the Gulf, there's gotta be untold numbers of yet-to-be-discovered white patches between Suwannee and Port Richey up to 20 miles offshore. And since summer water is usually clear, running on plane while wearing polarized sunglasses makes it easy enough to spot these sandy patches, even in 20 feet of water.

Grouper are almost always found near some sort of bottom structure, such as ledges, wrecks, rockpiles and soft bottom made up of sponges and colonies of soft coral. Unlike the deep mountainous ledges of the Gulf's Middlegrounds or the Atlantic shelf, nearshore bottom structure in the Gulf is comprised of shallow, submerged islands of limerock where these soft marine animals have taken hold, appearing from the surface as dark, mottled quiltworks.

If you motor along on plane, you will notice that this dark bottom is broken every so often by a brilliant white patch--that's what turns the heads of guys like Bradley and his crew as they quickly mark the spot with a buoy and punch the numbers into their loran. The best strategy for getting into position is to first pitch a marker buoy near the hole and continue along, marking several spots before coming off plane. This allows the hole to settle down after the buzz of the engine and the splash of the buoy disrupts the finny inhabitants below. Slowly motor around, back to the first marker, using that time to rig baits and tackle for the ensuing slugfest.

Anchor uptide of the marker, taking advantage of the wind and current to position your boat barely within casting distance of the white patch. Unlike deep water anchoring where you want to be right over the mark and being off a ledge by a foot or two can make the difference between catching and fishing, boat positioning in shallow water is not as critical since accurate casts can make up for the miss.

Choosing baits in summer is easy, given the abundance of bait schools that migrate inshore when the water warms up. Bradley uses live bait whenever it's available, which is just about all summer long, and he prefers sardines, which are thick in August. But squirrelfish and pinfish work well, too. It's great to get away from winter dead baits like frozen sardines and cut mullet, because with livies you won't catch the grunts and sea bass. Ninety-nine percent of the summer bite is grouper on live bait.