The right conditions, a good presentation, and teh right fly does the trick.

When you make the strip strike, remember to keep the rodtip down right at the water's surface and pointed toward the fly.

The sink rate of your crab fly is very important. Many anglers, when fishing for permit, have two rods rigged with flies of different weights and sink rates. They will use the slower sinking fly on shallow flats, and switch to a faster sinking fly on deeper flats. It's a strategy that can pay off.

Traveling permit present an entirely different challenge to the angler. Your odds of hooking one of these fast-moving fish is much less than that of hooking a feeding fish, and casting to them requires a different tact than casting to feeding fish.

You need to lead traveling fish by 10 or even 15 feet, depending on how fast the fish are moving and how fast your fly sinks. The ideal presentation has the fly sinking right in front of the permit.

The window of opportunity is usually a very narrow one with any permit you cast to. Here's a common scenario:

The angler is poised on the bow, ready to cast. His companion, poling the boat, sees a fish. "Permit, twelve o'clock, 100 feet, moving right at us," he says. As the fish moves toward the boat and the boat moves toward the fish, the poler kicks the boat around to give the angler a clear back cast.

"He's at ten o'clock, 80," he says. The problem is, the poler, with his better vision from the platform, sees the fish but the angler has yet to find it. The boat has now lost momentum, but the fish is still moving toward it. The angler finally sees the fish at 60 feet, makes two back casts, then casts the fly to the fish, now at 50 feet.

If you haven't experienced this sequence, it's difficult to tell you how fast it all happens. And the adrenaline pumping through your veins makes it seem to happen all that much faster. This window gives you one shot at the fish. Maybe, just maybe, one more if you're off target the first time and can put the fly back out immediately. Take four or five false casts and the fish will likely be gone before you make your first presentation.

Often, especially on calm days, the motions of casting will spook the permit. The more back casts you make the more chance of a spooked fish. Remember, speed and control catch permit, not long casts.

In the late winter and spring, when it's blowing 15 knots, most permit are caught on relatively short casts--40 feet or less. On windy days the fish aren't so spooky, and easier to catch on a fly. A quick, accurate short cast will get the job done for you. On these days, a full-size crab fly is best.

It's different in the fall and summer. Then, many days have only a light breeze and long, accurate casts are a big plus. On flat calm days you may need to cast like Rajeff to make a presentation before the fish spooks.

When you're planning a permit trip anywhere from Biscayne Bay to Key West, consult your Florida Sportsman Tide Guide before choosing your dates, but consider that in the winter and spring, tides are not nearly as important as the weather. If the weather is fishable, you go, and most days you go you'll find permit.

The more you go the more you'll know, and the more you know the more fish you're going to see. Again, tides are a factor in the spring, but not nearly so much as in the fall. If you have a choice, March can be super. If it's a warm February, that can be even better.

Fall fishing is different, and October can be a very good month, both fishing-wise and weather-wise. Permit can be scarce during periods of small tides, then pop up all over the flats with big tides.

Let's look at Key West tides as an example.

The height of the tides is crucial this time of the year. Crack open your FS Tide Guide and look at October. This month and next, weather permitting, the best permit fishing will be on the oceanside flats, from Sugarloaf Key all the way to the Marquesas. Most of these flats are shallow, and it will take a 1.8 or better tide to move fish up on the flats. And a 2.0 tidal height is even better. For example, this October's good tides are at the beginning, middle and end of the month. Plan your permit fishing expedition around these.

Again, the height of the tides isn't as important in the spring. One big factor is the great fishing you'll find on the Gulfside flats. On many of these flats, the best fishing is often on little tides, with a height of 1.4 to 1.6. It would be impossible to pinpoint any one Gulfside flat as being better than any other. There are over 30 miles of flats from the Content Keys to the Marquesas, any of which will have permit on them at times. However, for consistency, the flats from Jewfish Basin west to Boca Grande Channel are super permit flats. Finding fish here is not complicated, just choose an area where the water is two to three feet deep and start poling. As the tide rises, move farther up on the flat, and as it falls, move out to the edge of the flat.

On both the Atlantic and Gulf sides, during low water periods when the flats are too shallow for fish, you'll find depressions of different sizes and depths, especially those with openings to deep water, holding permit when the tide is low.

Sometimes the fish will feed along the shallow edge and sometimes they will school up and hold out in the deeper water. There, depressions can vary in size from one acre to many times that, and usually range from three to five feet deep during low tide.