While America was casting ballots, we were casting pyramid sinkers.

Drive-in fishing on Amelia Island produces flounder, trout and bluefish.

It was the week of the Presidential election, the final showdown, the Bush-Kerry Armageddon. The whole world was on the edge...of something. Two friends and I voted early, then sought asylum in the coastal borderlands of northeastern Florida.

We figured we could jam enough gear into my Suburban and Mark’s Jeep to survive indefinitely. Our inventory: one canoe, one 12-foot johnboat, two tents, innummerable rods, three mountain bikes, three surf boards, one propane stove and not a single functioning radio or television set.

Mark Holley, an earnest Republican from Jacksonville, confessed he’d brought a windup toy radio, but tragically, it sputtered and died within minutes. We agreed not to turn on the car radios. Cell phones were out, too.

The Atlantic Ocean would provide for our needs, physical as well as mental.

Minutes from our oak-shaded campsite, we thumped across a long, lonesome boardwalk to discover five miles of squeaky sand, not a condo or lifeguard stand in sight. Off on the horizon, a shrimpboat morphed into a Spanish galleon in my mind’s eye.

You aren’t allowed to drive a car on the beaches of Little Talbot Island, but you can sure enough ride a bike or pull a wheeled surf-fishing cart on the hard-packed sand. Little Tal is home for bruiser bull redfish. Hoping to tangle with one, early in the week we doused our campfire for a midnight surf-fishing expedition. Night access is a privilege campers enjoy over day-trippers here.

It was thrilling to wade into the breakers and heave half a pound of mullet into the darkness—real chest-beating action, masculine and dangerous. The only bites we got that night were from mosquitoes, but the episode washed us clean of mental toxins.

Daybreak was a little road trip north, crossing the Nassau Sound Bridge onto Amelia Island. Just north of the bridge, you find the proverbial end of the road at Amelia Island State Park. Pavement evaporates into sand. A sign reminds you to shift into 4-wheel-drive. “Why can’t Florida have more signs like that?” Mark asked rhetorically.

This is one of those fishing spots where you are happy to meet someone. There’s plenty of elbow room; it’s low-key, non-competitive. We talked to a handful of anglers, including an elderly couple who’d recently moved down from Indiana. They’d reached the age where age is just a mathematic triviality, and smiled as they talked about fishing together as often as possible.

“We’d built a house up there we planned to spend the rest of our lives in,” the man said. “But we kept coming to Florida, and one year said the heck with it.”

They were staked out behind a spiffy new four-door pickup, spinning rods in sand spikes, not a care in the world.

Just up the line, a wade-fisherman and I teamed up on a good trout bite along the wave-scoured boulders of a little jetty. I’d walk out, catch a fish, then pass the man on the way to shore. When I returned, he’d be walking back to his truck with a fish of his own. I was using a 7-foot spinning outfit with 30-pound mono leader, a 1⁄4-ounce jighead and a live finger mullet hooked through the lips. He had a light plugger with a sliding egg-sinker rig, also baited with mullet.

Each time we passed, we delivered the single-finger salute fishermen seem to fumble so often these days: a thumbs-up.

Sprawled behind the Jeep, Mark and Jim Nichols monitored our 12-foot surf spinners from aluminum folding chairs. The rods were spooled with 17-pound mono, terminating in a basic fishfinder rig: 4-ounce pyramid sinker clipped to a plastic sinker slide, followed by a small swivel, 18 inches of 30-pound mono leader and a longshank 4/0 hook.

We were amply supplied with bait, as was most everyone we ran into. Next to the George Crady Memorial Bridge—a shore-fishing hotspot in its own right—I’d had no trouble cast-netting a dozen finger mullet. We kept them alive in a 5-gallon bucket, adding new water every 15 minutes or so. We also bought some frozen bait at the Nassau Sound Bait and Tackle shop, if for no other reason than to chat up Jim Johnson, a cheery local guide who runs the shop part time.