When the sun's too low for sight casting, Joe Catigano blind casts flats strewn with potholes.

Fly fishermen possess a rare trait. A desire to experience hot fishing, in its purest form, boils through their veins. Never mind that spin fishing is easier. Tempting gamesters with your own hand-tied creations adds a personal touch. Ready for a topnotch challenge? Slip into the badlands, Mosquito Lagoon's infamous shallows, to experience sport fit for kings and flyrod purists. Speckled trout pepper these flats. Camouflaged grass ghosts hold court along the edges of interspersed white holes, hidden to all except the most astute sight caster.

Finding them can be difficult; getting them to eat is even harder.

Counting the minutes until spring's predawn light shone bright enough to navigate Mosquito Lagoon's maze of sandbars, shoals and humps fed my excitement. Ahead lay a challenge I'd dreamed of for the past two seasons--pursuing Lagoon gator trout with fly tackle. Captain Joe Catigano patiently took the wait in stride. He carefully double-checked my fly leader, running his fingers over every inch, inspecting for telltale nicks. Satisfied it was up to snuff, Catigano announced it was time to go. Finally, gray skies soon gave way to daybreak's pale pink glow as he fired up the outboard and headed south, toward obscure, not oft-seen Lagoon backwaters.

Let me tell you, traversing the Lagoon before the sun rises high enough to really see the bottom is downright tricky. Several times I glanced over the gunnel, mildly alarmed at the seemingly too-shallow bottom. An array of subsurface features whisked by, disappearing in our wake at a clip slightly less than the speed of light. Joe never pulled back on the throttle. Instead, he trimmed the motor higher, and turned the skiff toward a tiny hole between two islands. With expert precision we came to rest in a small, three-foot by six-foot depression, without chopping even one blade of seagrass.

Pinch me. In front of my eyes was a shallow flat, neatly tucked behind a trio of scrubby mangrove isles. A humped ridge ran like a spine off to our right. Dark, green grass opened into irregularly shaped, shelly white holes a mere ten yards from the ridge's crest. I jumped onto the poling platform and silently glided the skiff deeper into trout wonderland.

From atop his bow perch, Catigano began fan casting to the first series of white holes in our path. He pushed the fly line long and low toward his target, using a minimum of false casts. Employing delicate finesse, he'd land the Muddler Minnow two feet beyond each light colored depression, softly dropping the fly onto the flat's mirror surface, barely raising a ripple. It became a rhythm. He continued his calculated blind casting with flawless form, picking likely hotspots. Grass ghost haunts we call 'em.

Cast, wait, strip, strip, stop. Strip, strip, stop.

His short, two-inch retrieve imparted lifelike action to the light pink-and-brown Marabou Muddler. I couldn't imagine any respectable trout ignoring the enticing, feather offering for long.

"Don't move," Joe whispered, barely pointing to a minuscule, lone depression some forty feet distant, cut by an old prop scar. "I noticed a silver flash, can you see anything?" he asked. Before I could reply, he pumped the line with one false cast and delicately laid the Marabou Muddler along the far edge of the hole.

Ker-whoosh!

The fly vanished into a hollow of another type; the kind made by a hungry trout that wants to eat. It was a strike best described to me by two Tennessee, smallmouth bass flyfishing addicts earlier this spring: a real commode flusher. Leave it to a pair of out-of-towners to coin an appropriate phrase to accurately illustrate a savage, flats-style surface slam.

Catigano set the hook hard, except this gator trout paid no heed. Joe never once turned the massive fish, now hitting warp speed. The trout blazed a trail toward a series of mangrove stumps. Then, it stopped scant yards short to initiate an unexpected, head-thrashing aerial assault. On the fish's third leap--that's right, it jumped--Joe's line went limp. He collected the fly line while I descended from the poling platform. Time to regroup. That bad boy ate us alive.

How big was his fish? We could only guess. But, both of us agreed on 10 pounds minimum, possibly 12 or 13.

My turn. After trading places, we worked our way across the hidden flat and never saw another trout. Not one. Plenty of redfish, but no trout. Happy redfish pushed on our left, teasing us without mercy. Ever notice how hard it is to think trout when a school of redfish flashes tails nearby? Catigano read my mind. He quickly reminded me if I wanted a gator trout we needed to utilize the early morning's low light to our advantage. "We'll come back to the reds later," he promised.

Our next destination bore little resemblance to the first stop. Flat number two's rarely visited backwaters were also nestled neatly behind mangrove islands skirting Mosquito Lagoon's eastern shore, almost due east of Haulover Canal. Yet, that's where their similarities ended. This flat consisted mostly of mud, with grass splotches randomly dotting the bottom. Adjacent to each grass patch was a rim of hard bottom. The white holes in this stretch were not holes per se, but fine, shell skirts separating intermittent grass parcels from mud bottom. Sparse bottom terrain made sight casting to trout much easier. There simply were not many places for them to hide. Grass ghost gator silhouettes stood out against the mud. Yet, we experienced one drawback. The trout could see us, too. Most blew from cover before we could maneuver into casting range. Wisps of mud trails crisscrossed our path.