Permit are designed to disappear on the flats. Their mirror sides reflect their surroundings, and often all that you can see is the black tips of their tails, or their shadows as they move over the bottom. Tough as they are to see, they don't seem to know it. They act like they're wearing Day-glo life jackets with strobe lights on the collars and towing buoys with loudspeakers blaring, "LOOKY HERE--I'M A PERMIT!"

Their path of travel is erratic, to say the least. They zig and zag, racing across the flats in fits and starts. When they stop to nose into the flat, it isn't for long. When their heads come up they are invariably traveling in a direction different than they were before they paused.

A permit on the flats acts like a scared mouse in the middle of an empty room. It's tough to anticipate them with a cast and drop a bait on their nose.

But just like permit everywhere, permit on the flats have a tough time saying no to a live crab. Playing the averages with a cast makes them catchable.

A trio of fish popped up out of the green hole onto the flat--a great situation, because when there's more than one, they get competitive and are much more likely to charge a bait, lure or fly. I wound up for a cast, and the fish split up, each lurching off in a different direction. I cast in front of and way beyond the closest fish, the crab sailing nicely on 8-pound spinning tackle. As it landed, I closed the bail and began reeling, with the rod held high. The crab skittered across the surface, and by timing the retrieve to match the fish's speed, I managed to pull the crab in front of its nose. The crab was three feet in front of the fish when I stopped reeling and dropped the rod. He'd seen it.

The crab struggled to make the bottom, but the permit shot forward and sucked it up. It was a textbook take. I set the hook and the permit tore across the flat.

Permit on the flats will do a pretty good job of wearing themselves out. It takes time--all permit are tough--but with nowhere to go but faster, they are at the mercy of their own fear in shallow water. They also have a penchant for putting their noses on the bottom and scrubbing the hook out of their mouths. Either the hook gets rubbed out or the line gets rubbed in two--it's a common permit trick and one of the disadvantages to fighting them on the flats.

This one didn't stop to scrape his lips on the bottom, but instead blasted toward the channel. Which meant as soon as he cleared the flat, he was likely to sound, in order to pull the taught mono across the edge of the flat. That would be an almost sure cutoff.

I held the rod high to get the line out of the water and decrease the odds of the fish sawing it across the edge of the flat. Gonzalez poled like a maniac, and we slid into the channel right behind the fish, to slug it out in deep water. With 12 feet of water under him, the fish dove, but over the next 10 minutes he never managed to spend enough time on the bottom to dislodge the hook. Or wrap the line around anything. Patience, persistence and luck were with us, and shortly Gonzalez had the fish safely inside the landing net, where he unhooked it and sent it on its way once again. The outgoing tide had left the flat too shallow now for permit, so we switched game plans.

Just as permit on the flats can be impossible to anticipate, the same fish in a different situation can be almost predictable. Anglers who fish permit over Gulf wrecks know this--and so do those who fish the permit that cruise the channels between Biscayne Bay and the ocean in the spring. From Key Biscayne south to Sands Key the channels that cut through the flats provide miles and miles of edges along which permit cruise and feed in time to the tides. Specific locations are something which must be sought out each season, and just because a particular edge works one year, or one month, doesn't necessarily mean it will be good the next time you go back.

As with the flats, the key to locating a good location is to find the components that make a place appealing to permit. In the case of flats, it's rich bottom with enough depth to let the fish feel comfortable, with adjacent deep water and good tidal flow. This fulfills a permit's needs, and so provides a good place to fish for them.

When permit cruise the channels, they are also looking for food. They tend to run from one comfortable area to another, using the channels as a conveyor belt for groceries as well as travel lanes between the grassy basins of Biscayne Bay and the hard, deep, fan and sponge studded flats on the ocean. Experienced permit fishermen look for a good strong current and a handy ambush point. The ambush point simply means the edge of a flat deep enough to stake out on and wait for the fish to cruise by.

"You may hear them before you see them," said Gonzalez as we settled in to wait alongside a channel he said would produce. "They suck crabs off the surface, and you'll hear them hit the crabs. Just like snook."

We were set up a comfortable cast away from a strong outgoing current. Bits of weed and flotsam raced out toward the ocean, life rafts for the crustaceans the permit would be feeding on.

As far as the presentation is concerned, the drill is typiclaly the same: Cast the crab beyond the path of the permit, then skitter it back on an intercept. In this case, the path of the permit would be defined by the edge of the flat. There is little guessing as to where the fish will go. It will tend to follow a consistent line into the tide.

"Look for them swimming high in the water column," he added. "They're easy to see. They swim just under the surface and they'll look taupe."

Taupe, he said, they'll be taupe.

How perfect. Not only are these fish an exclusive, reclusive, highly selective trophy, a feather in the cap of any angler, the toast of Biscayne Bay, but they come in designer colors. Tres chic!

About that time I heard a funky "pop" but by the time I got a fix on the fish he'd passed us by, cruising fast in the channel. Sure enough, in this deep channel the fish looked the gray-brown, a cross between poupon mustard and a live shrimp. A couple more slipped past me in the glare over the next hour, and by the time I got with the program the tide was beginning to slow. The next fish came bounding along at a steady clip, high in the water. I tossed the crab upstream, pulled it in front of him and he sipped it off the surface.

Pop!

I set the hook. He pulled back, then bolted, and suddenly the line went slack.

I reeled in to see what had gone wrong. Everything looked fine, but then I saw the problem. A hollow little pointy crab part had slipped over the point of my hook. After the fish sucked the crab off the surface, he had crushed it. When I set the hook, it slipped into the little piece of shell, which was jammed down over the point and barb like a protective cover. Just to make a day of it, we slipped back in to the bay to look for a bonefish before heading back to the dock. We found them, but they wouldn't eat. That's where we rounded out Gonzalez's Visual Grand Slam. A lot of people who fish with Gonzalez have these visuals to their credit--and if they get lucky, they can sometimes catch what they see.

The bonefish wouldn't eat and the tarpon got away, but it had been full day nonetheless. Running back to the dock we noticed a couple of boats staked out alongside flats, next to channels where the current ran swift. We sure hadn't seen them during the day, and it dawned on me, we'd been downright lonesome, considering it was a prime day in tarpon season.