The south jetty at Jupiter provides easy access from Jupiter Beach Park.

These great fishing spots are notable for their variety. A change of seasons or a change of tides can bring exciting new possibilities. Whether you’re casting from shore, fishing the inside flats, or bound for the blue water, you’ll want to join us each month for an inside look at these waterways.

I was standing in fish chowder, the heavy scent oozing around me like warm oil on the slow breeze off the gentle surf. It was not unpleasant. The fish were alive, an inch long, and transparent as glass.

There were billions of them, as far as I could see, in the inch-deep water where the sea met the sand. And along the deeper water of the trough, Spanish mackerel were doing headstands over them, snook were turning them into popcorn from below, jacks and bluefish were chasing them out on the beach and pelicans were gulping them up by the bucketbill.

Throw a two-inch chrome spoon into the surf, reel in a mackerel. Throw it again, reel in (not as easily) a snook. Throw it once more and a tarpon takes it away from you and heads for West End.

Ho hum, just another morning at St. Lucie Inlet. If the glass minnows aren’t running, the silver mullet are. When either is scarce, the pilchards, ballyhoo and thread herring rule. It’s a moving feast that changes with the seasons, but the gamefish are the near constant. Because of the unique location of St. Lucie and Jupiter, her sister inlet just a few miles south, the fishing here is maybe the best inshore-offshore combination Florida has to offer. Both sit just north of the state’s “elbow” into the west arm of the Gulf Stream, and benefit from the back eddies of this massive, year-round flow of clear, warm water.

On the inside, it’s mostly about snook. These inlets get stiff with lunkers during the summer spawn. Biologist Ron Taylor of the Florida Marine Research Institute says that the snook here, like the seatrout, grow faster and fatter than their cousins on the west coast due to the abundant bait and always-warm water. In fact, the fish average so large that many guides complain they have a tough time finding fish under the new 34-inch maximum for their customers who want a snook to eat! (All guides should have such problems).

A trip I made to St. Lucie last July with veteran snooker and lure inventor Mark Nichols was typical. We drifted the “Hole In the Wall” area on the south side of the main pass on an outgoing tide, dragging soft plastic mullet along bottom in about 8 to 10 feet of water. It’s a sand bottom littered with tree snags. On every drift, one of us stuck a snook over 10 pounds, and some of the fish went well up into the teens. Some might have been bigger—we’ll never know, because we couldn’t hold them out of the sunken logs with our “spindly” 20-pound tackle.

“It’s like this from late May through September,” Nichols told me. “Move around until you find where the schools are stacked and it’s instant snook, for as long as you care to fish.” In fact, finding the fish can be a gimme in the inlets on incoming tide, when the clear water makes it perfectly obvious where the fish have gathered. They usually hang around some sort of structure that partially blocks the current—outcrops in the jetties, sandbars, etc. (The sandbar off the south jetty is a famed snooking spot.) Fishing the clear water usually requires live sardines (pilchards), which are used both as live chum and as freelined or lightly weighted offerings on 1/0 livebait hooks. However, you can also catch the fish during murky-water periods and at dawn, dusk and after dark on artificials, including flies; this is the haunt of many tippet-class record chasers.

You don’t even need a boat to score here. The flats of the Indian River to the north of St. Lucie are fabled spots for big snook and trout, with the snook most often found under the docks and in the boat channels, the trout more frequently over the grass and around the bars. In fact, this is one area where a skilled wader can fully expect to connect with a trout of 5 pounds, daily, and that 10-pounder is again a possibility. The fish tend to congregate around the ankle-deep bars, where they lie among the leaping mullet, and the bite is usually best at dawn, dusk or after sundown. (Wading here after dark is a special challenge because of the mantis shrimp, which are inclined to jab you in the ankle if you step too close to their turf. It hurts, and worse, you usually think it’s a stingray hit at first.

You can also fish the outer inlet by walking down the beach from either the north or the south side. In both cases, it’s a long walk because there’s no parking area close to the inlet. However, if you make the trip in October, chances are good that you’ll find plenty of fishing to entertain you on the walk, and it may be so good you never make it all the way to the inlet.