For pure thrills, it's hard to beat catching kingfish on light tackle. Solid hits, long runs, occasional jumps-in my book these fishy attributes make for exciting days on the water.

What's especially cool about kingfish is their willingness to linger in a chumslick behind your boat. Of course linger may not be the right word. Hip readers might describe those splashy, skyrocketing strikes as something resembling a marine mosh pit.

We came prepared to mix it up on a recent trip to the Florida Keys. Captain Jack Carlson of Marathon had his sights on a few kings for the smoker. I wanted to try topwater lures. Kevin Alexander of Boynton Beach was game for anything. Marine artist Joe Suroviec, organizer of our little expedition, was amping to wreak havoc on whatever finny creature would swim his way.

Suroviec, whose most recent work includes illustrations for Charles F. Waterman's column in this magazine, apparently powers his creative engines with high-octane fish oil. At sunrise, he joined Jack at the bow to castnet pilchards on oceanside grassflats near Knight Key. For half an hour the two pancaked big nets with the tenacity of tag-team wrestlers, depositing baits in the stern, only to race to the bow to throw again. Jack was energetic, but Joe was manic, shouting the whole time. When a pod of pelicans crashed into a pilchard school: "Black sheep squadron, 11 o'clock! Bombs away!" When pilchards broke ranks to flee the net: "They're running like al Qaeda!" When an especially large load hit the deck: "Call in the factory ship!" 

By the time bait-catching was finished, Joe's exuberence had given us all a contact buzz that would sustain us for the 30-mile run to our first fishing site.

Jack punched the GPS numbers for a boat wreck in 30 feet of water, northwest of Marathon in the Gulf of Mexico. Along this part of the coast, the bottom drops off roughly a foot a mile; on the Atlantic side of the Keys, six miles or so puts you in 100 feet, followed by about another 100 feet per mile. This particular wreck, Jack explained, had been augmented over the years with various household appliances like washers and dryers (a practice that is no longer legal). Like many such spots in the area, the structure typically holds kingfish November through February, after which the kings begin migrating north along Florida's Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

That migatory route, by the way, takes kings over public wrecks and reefs which appear on fishing charts for every region of the state. The fish don't change much in their feeding habits; they just follow the bait and water temps between about 70 and 80 degrees. The techniques we planned to use on Carlson's boat could easily be adapted elsewhere.

Our first stop produced a giant barracuda and a ravenous school of bluefish-both formidable challenges if you hope to land kingfish. If the blues don't take your bait, the cuda will take your king.

We moved another ten miles offshore to a sunken airplane in a field of lobster trap buoys. An immediate hook-up on a live pilchard, followed by a long, drag-squalling run, told us we'd found the kings.

Carlson's strategy is to anchor upcurrent of a wreck and start a chumslick with a block of frozen chum thawing in a meshbag. Into this trail of scent and oil, he tosses one or more free-swimming livies every few minutes. A pair of nostril-hooked pilchards drift on flatlines in the danger zone-but not for long if kingfish are in the area.

This is a time-honored approach used in many parts of the state (including my home waters of Miami), and it opens up a lot of opportunities for different angling styles.

Carlson packed a quiver of 10-, 12- and 15-pound spinning outfits for flatlining live baits. His terminal rigging consisted of about two feet of No. 6 singlestrand wire, haywire twisted to a 2/0 treble hook and a small black swivel. Carlson ties a Bimini twist in the fishing line, and then a uni-knot to the swivel.

If someone catches a small blue runner-usually easy to do with a jig and shrimp on a shallow wreck-Carlson will rig it up with a forward treble through the nostrils, and a rear stinger treble pinned in the back. A popping float pegged on the line above the swivel helps give the skipper a visual to confirm the hard-swimming runner is not hiding out beneath the boat. The smaller, 3- to 6-inch pilchards get bites from all sizes of kingfish, but a runner is a real smoker-getter.