Sometimes it pays to pick up and move; other times it's best to wait for the reds to come to you.

Should I stay or should I go now? It’s a question I often find myself asking when redfish are the target.

I always smile as the ghost of Joe Strummer bellows his famous inquiry across the boat. It’s a “clash” of angling preferences: sit and wait, or look for new water?

Sight-fishing has become such a mainstay of our angling that it seems natural to keep on the move. We pole, bump the trolling motor, wade, paddle, whatever, to cover as much water as we can. Riddled with anxiety, our vision of El Dorado is a square tail flicking above the surface, maybe a copper missile crossing a pothole in a grassflat.

That kind of active hunting in extreme shallows can make for great fishing, but some days, it’s little more than good exercise. Some days it’s downright stressful.

Subtle changes in sun angle, current and other factors—including local fishing pressure—may conspire to make reds awfully hard to find on the flats. When you do find them, they may be tight-lipped, aware of the sound or sight of your approach.

I’ve seen days on Pine Island Sound and the Indian River when schools of sheepshead would blow out from the boat, setting off a chain reaction spooking every red within half a mile. Mullet can do the same thing. So can boats with goons at the wheel.

Sometimes it makes better sense to pick a fishy spot and just sit still, fishing like we used to in the old days. Docks, mangrove shorelines, oyster bars, passes—these are intercept points where, on the right tide, you’ll often run into more bites per hour by staying put. Remember that reds are foragers; it’s in their nature to move in pursuit of food.

Captain Scott Hughes of Fort Myers is well-versed in both approaches, and on a recent trip on Pine Island Sound, he and I split our day about fifty-fifty, sight-fishing and still-fishing. Hughes runs charters on a boat much like my own—a larger skiff easier to propel by trolling motor than pushpole. At low tide, on a skinny, channel-edge grassflat, we found a classic sight-fish setup: A school of a dozen or so reds, slowly digging, making little swirls with their tails as they eased along. I threw a plastic-tail jig about three feet in front of the fish, reeled tight and twitched the rodtip...once. A fat one immediately sucked in the jig and made a typical schoolie redfish ruckus, shaking bright bronze on the surface.

Unfortunately, its schoolmates departed. The tide was coming in pretty quickly. On the lower Gulf Coast of Florida, tailing redfish action is usually confined to a window around the end of the outgoing and the beginning of an incoming tide. When the water gets deep enough to conceal their whereabouts, it’s curtains for sight-fishing.

A good approach on busy waters: Anchcoring and still-fishing a mangrove point.

“Those fish’ll probably move up under the mangroves with this higher water,” Hughes said.

We staked off a couple of shady shoreline points, spending no more than 20 minutes at each one. Simplifying this stop-and-go process, Hughes has an electric staking device on his transom; at the flip of a switch, a spider-leg apparatus pokes a stiff spike and holds bottom. In lieu of this, a pushpole or small anchor attached to nylon rode can be used for quick stops. The point is, still-fishing doesn’t have to—make that shouldn’t—mean hanging in one spot all day. It just means staying put long enough to capture the interest of roving reds.

Under the canopy of mangroves we soaked live whitebait and chunks of cut ladyfish. Both worked equally well—which should come as encouragement to Gulf Coasters who fret about finding and cast-netting whitebait. Ladyfish are easy to catch on a small jig out over deep grass, say four to six feet. Two or three of average size provide enough 3⁄4-inch steaks to keep you in the game. “This is without a doubt one of the best redfish baits,” said Hughes. “It’s oily, shiny and won’t get pecked off the hook by pinfish and other scavengers.”