Author plays the wading game.

Rigging is a cinch. Simply pin the steak on a 1⁄4-ounce jighead and you’re done. If there’s a lot of current or water deeper than five feet, use a slightly heavier jig, or perhaps a sliding sinker rig with an ounce or so of lead. The jighead is handy as it reduces the amount of terminal gear and re-rigging you’ll do on a typical day of mixed-bag fishing. When you’re ready to move, say prospect for seatrout on the grassflats, simply add a grubtail, shad-tail, shrimp-tail and or some other soft plastic in place of the ladyfish.

Chunks of mullet, ballyhoo, pinfish, crab: The list of things a redfish will eat is far longer than what they will not eat. Live versions can be dynamite, too—especially on open water flats— but in close quarters, it seems the olfactory attraction of a piece of cutbait may be stronger.

Hughes and I caught probably a dozen reds in a few hours, even tallied a snook jump-and-release.

Reds under the bushes are sneaky. They can come and go without you knowing, slithering beneath the shadows, leaving no trace. Staked off in clean water and light-sand bottom, you might spot a fish or two prowling the edge of the trees. This opens up the possibility of a hybrid style of redfishing: Sight-fishing from a stationary boat.

One of the more memorable instances when this paid off for me was on a recent trip on my home waters near Fort Pierce. Here, the southern end of the ribbon-like Indian River Lagoon isn’t as densely populated with reds as the northern end, where the sprawling Banana River and Mosquito Lagoon complexes host year-round schools of breeding-size fish. Nor does it hold a candle, redfish-wise, to Pine Island Sound and many Gulf Coast waterways. Trout and snook? Some of the biggest on the planet. Reds? Catch one here and it’s a gambit for conversation, particularly if caught deliberately.

On a misty, pre-cold front winter day, Florida Sportsman Field Editor Buck Hall and I poked around a mangrove shoreline looking for seatrout. We found them schooled up on the deep side of a long shelf about 40 feet off the mangroves. I pulled us in tight to the bushes with my trolling motor, where we began throwing 3-inch white jerkbaits and enjoying banner trout action. Munching on a sandwich between casts, I noticed a copper-colored shadow out of the corner of my left eye. The fish emerged from the prop roots of a red mangrove and cruised slowly across a raceway of white sand. Minutes earlier I’d seen one just like it and made an unsuccessful cast.

“Buck; quick, throw out in front of him,” I gasped. “That fish is as long as your leg!”

Quietly covering water on the trolling motor.

Buck made a perfect cast. The fish jumped all over his jig and put up a great fight on light spinning gear.

I’ve seen countless scenarios like this, all around the state, but more often than not it comes as a surprise. We demonstrated how blending approaches—sight-fishing while site-fishing—can be a good way to intercept reds.

Lower Tampa Bay is laced with mangrove creeks, and reds here move in and out with the tides, often riding herd on schools of mullet. One day last fall, my friend Capt. Geoff Page invited me to fish a few special creeks he’d picked out. The water wasn’t quite clear or shallow enough for genuine sight-fishing, but Page was more interested in fan-casting certain bars along the creeks and outside shorelines.

We eased up inside one creek, trolling motor on low power. My companion and I tossed small jigheads with a green-and-white, soft-plastic shad tail. Mullet rippled the surface.

“Right in this corner, there’ll be one after the other,” Page said. And he was right. There was a steady parade of reds moving out with the tide; repeated casting in their neighborhood earned us a steady parade of bent rods.

When the tide got too low for the creeks, Page suggested a change of venue. We loaded the boat, had lunch and trailered to Sarasota Bay. For some fishing guides, this kind of large-scale assault would be unusual. Worse yet, Page expresses a vocal aversion to natural baits.