Those teeth are dangerous, if you happen to be a baitfish or an artificial lure.

These are menacing trout. Every one of them is pushing the 5- to 6-pound envelope with gaping yellow maws, sagging bellies and the appetites of fish many times their size.

They're cruising in small pods, protecting a specific parcel of turtle grass as though their lives depended on it. I can see them, Ed can see them and for a glorious moment last winter, they were eating our lures as if they had never seen a plastic worm in their lives.

On repeated drifts that covered about 100 yards, every cast within an exact 150-square-foot area drew a strike.

We fished your basic patch of broken bottom--no large potholes but several sandy patches interspersed with grassy patches. Not too far away was a shoreline oyster bar, the mouth of a dock-lined residential canal and a 6- or 8-foot channel. The Anclote River Power Plant loomed nearby.

In a sense, the spot had everything to offer a fish that had just spent the winter holed up in the stagnant water of a residential canal. Deep (warmer) water was nearby in case a late season cold front blew the fish off the flats. The surrounding grass and adjacent oysters were providing cover for large schools of finger mullet that were subsequently providing food for the trout. In these times of pre spring warmth, the shallow is known by my guide to warm up quickly with the rising sun. By 1 or 2 p.m., the flat is often seven or eight degrees warmer than it was at sunrise.

The area was a veritable smorgasbord of life.

One hundred yards to my left, glass minnows clouded anonymous patches of flat where schools of ladyfish played bully. But just off the bow, in the aforementioned area, nervous skitters of vulnerable mullet screamed for the obligatory topwater.

Two years ago, I might have tied on a Bill Norman RatLure, a Bagley's Finger Mullet or maybe a 5M MirrOlure. Today it's a jerkbait worked in a slow but radical, manner that the trout are jumping all over. The strikes came without hesitation, in full view.

At one moment, I was staring at a school of big trout, one of which just took a swipe at my Slam 'R. One of a variety of jerkbaits now flooding the saltwater market. He missed it with a noisy splash at the top and the others began circling aggressively. Just 10 feet from the end of my rodtip were three quality trout fighting over my wormlike lure. I was almost too worked up to react when a fourth fish bolted in out of nowhere and sucked up my bait.

Almost.

"Whoa!" I hollered, as 22 inches of speckled madness shook its head and did a dandy tailwalk within handshake distance of the boat. "Where did that fish come from?"

In the bow, Capt. Ed Walker was bowed up with a fat trout of his own--a fish he'd spotted in another school of three or four cruising the edge of a pothole. I landed and released my fish quickly and settled in to watch Walker handle his, a true gator of the yellow-mouthed, fatbelly persuasion.

"These fish are soupy in here," said Walker. "Look at them over there."

He was pointing at a small pothole 20 yards away where six or seven specks were cruising away from us. They weren't in a hurry, but the sound of their brethren doing the headshakes on the surface was definitely making them a little uncomfortable.

"Before the net ban," said Walker, "this school of fish would have lasted about one day out here."

Call these fish trout in transition--transition from the deepwater refuges of winter to the warming flats of spring and transition from a habitat dominated by miles of monofilament mesh to a sanctuary where their success is almost guaranteed by strict size and bag limitations and now a 2-month closed season.

I guess you could also call them happy trout.

From the tower of his 21-foot Hydraskiff, Walker can see them all. He recently acquired the tower boat and uses it exclusively when searching for new areas to fish. His running perch some six feet above the normal line of sight on a flats skiff has opened up a panorama he didn't have before. Now, much like the gill netter who used a bow perch to spot fleeing trout--or mullet or sheepshead or pompano and permit--before wrapping them up in monofilament, Walker can cruise the shallows looking for fish before he casts.

"That's how the netters wiped out all the trout," says Walker, who has had more than his share of run-ins with the gill net crowd. "They'd get up in the bow or on a tower and just cruise around looking for those trout. As soon as they spot a few they'd drop the lead and wrap 600 yards of net around them. They'd just kill 'em. I've seen guys make a 500-pound set in an area about twice the size of your living room. They could wipe out a whole flat in five minutes."

Walker's blood pressure is more stable these days partly due to the net ban and partly to trout fishing.While the Palm Harbor guide makes the meat of his living during tarpon season, there's something about a 6-pound trout that sets him off.