Redfish are notorious for sticking tight to docks.

I’ll be the first to admit there are prettier places to fish. For soul-stirring scenery, try the mangrove-shadowed rivers of the Everglades. The limitless blue Gulf Stream on a crisp winter day. Shimmering grassflats around the Marquesas Keys.

For just plain fishin’, though, where it’s all about easy access and number of casts per bite, none of those places holds a candle to some old dock on the Indian River Lagoon.

The dock half of that equation is a function of structure. Docks work about like artificial reefs do offshore. They offer shade and ambush points for gamefish, shelter and food for smaller forage species. I suppose the jury is still out on whether such attributes make up for the detrimental impacts of unnatural shade on seagrass beds. Docks change things. We know that for sure. How do such changes fit into the tangled accounting of our remodeling job on the Florida coastline—inlets, drainage canals, bridges, power plant intakes and the like? I don’t have the answer. It’s good for anglers to think about the environment, but in the end we try to catch fish. Docks are good places for that.

Why the Indian River Lagoon? There’s an easy explanation for that one. You have unparalleled variety of saltwater fish: tropical species such as snook and tarpon; familiar temperate types like seatrout and redfish; even reef fish including grouper and mangrove snapper. There’s also straightforward navigation here. The lagoon runs north, the lagoon runs south. You can’t get lost. The Intracoastal Waterway runs right up the middle of the lagoon, passing boat ramps and fisherman-friendly towns: Stuart, Fort Pierce, Vero Beach, Sebastian, Titusville.

Finding a dock to cast to is simple. Any of them can be productive at some time or another. But after a while you’ll notice characteristics that make some stand out from others.

Months after hurricanes Frances and Jeanne blasted my neck of the woods, only about one in five docks had any planking. The rest were just pilings. One in ten had been rebuilt completely, with signs of angling life in the form of a skiff on a lift, or—mysteriously enough—a yellow bait bucket hanging nearby. Wanna guess where the best fishing was? Yup, the other one in ten—the docks with good shade but no apparent competition from resident fishermen.

Tides are a huge part of dock fishing. And that’s one factor that takes a little thinking. Basically, the farther you get from an ocean inlet, the greater the delay in the tide. Here’s another catch: There are no hard and fast rules about dock fishing on one tide or another. Some sections of the lagoon—particularly on the western shoreline—are shoally and won’t float a needlefish at low tide. Here the top of a rising tide may produce the best action, as fish move toward shore, following bait schools up a dock as if climbing the rungs of a ladder. A relatively long dock that terminates in five or six feet of water may be a good producer around the low tide. You have to experiment some, keeping a personal log of currents and comparing what you find with formal tide predictions for the area. Sooner or later you’ll get dialed in.

This angler hooks a fish while casting uptide, top, and then pressures it safely downcurrent. The 120-mile-long Indian River Lagoon offers countless docks; this is one of many dozens along the 15-mile stretch between Jensen Beach and Fort Pierce.

If you can’t count on experience as your guide, you can at least count on this: A moving tide is far, far better than slack tide. I have seen otherwise fishless docks turn into a cauldron of activity with a pickup in the current, and vice-versa.

How you approach a dock also takes some consideration. Obviously you can’t pull off the side of the road and stroll out on someone’s private dock. By dock fishing I am primarily referring to a boater’s game, one that involves careful and stealthy positioning. In some neighborhoods you can get by with wading out from public parks. Waterfront property owners—as much as some would argue—do not own the water. They own the dock, but not the spaces in between. I’ve had some great days doing the stingray-shuffle from one dock to the next. Down at water level you see the things that make docks so attractive to gamefish—the bone-white barnacles clinging to the pilings; the dark oysters clumped here and there on bottom; a blue crab scuttling among the rank detritus near shore.