Customized shiner-slinger makes it easy to pitch chummers far from the boat.

It ain’t chopped liver.

In fact, a lot of anglers are learning that chopped baitfish is treated a lot more like caviar by redfish that might otherwise be tough to catch.

A trip I made with Capt. Chet Jennings on Tampa Bay recently proves the point.

Both of us regularly fish the flats south of the Little Manatee River, and on this day we joined forces to try to fool redfish that some anglers said were actually running away from live sardines on the hook, though they would eat wounded baits tossed out as chum.

We anchored up off a little mangrove point and Chet whacked up a half-dozen threadfins, tossing them as close to the point as possible with his “wiffle bat” (see accompanying story).

For a while, the only thing that ate our baits was pinfish. But then I saw a big boil and my line began to move off quickly. I cranked the circle hook home and was fast to a 30-inch red. A second later, two other rods went off, and we were soon doing that crazed dance that all anglers love to do, trying to keep the lines from making a string puzzle before we could sort things out. We caught two more fish on that spot, moved 300 yards down the shore and caught three more before the tide died, and with it the bite.

To be sure, most of the time you can pull up on any flat where reds are active, whale away with a weedless gold spoon, a topwater or a jerkbait and readily connect with some big spot-tails in a lot of places along the West coast. Add live sardines to the mix and it’s no contest.

But anglers on Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor are discovering that the fish there sometimes become wise to the ways of hooks and lines, particularly on weekends when the pressure is most intense. And these days, some experts note, the weekend effect is a four-day deal, extending from Friday through Monday—it can be Tuesday before the fish calm down and go back to their normal feeding patterns.

By reviving a tactic that has been around for more than 40 years, however, some savvy anglers are starting to connect with even the most hard-fished reds. The trick is to take advantage of the redfish’s well-developed sense of smell. Before sight-fishing arrived in force in Florida waters beginning about 20 years ago, reds were thought of in some quarters as bottom-grubbers just a cut above catfish because of their predilection to feed by scent as much as sight. And one of the favorite tactics, as taught to me years ago by my long-time mentor, Capt. Gene Lechler of Homosassa, was to cut up a couple fillets of mullet, broadcast them over a rocky point on a strong tide flow, and sit there until the redfish came to you. The reds could then be caught on the same bait you used for chum, typically a slab of mullet about two inches square, with the skin left on so that it stuck to the hook better.

The new breed of chum-choppers are mostly castnetters, and the baits they use tend to be scaled sardines, threadfins or menhaden, all of them at least as effective as mullet. Of course, in cooler months it can sometimes be a little tricky to find nettable bait, but those who use heavy nets and find the schools on their depthfinders can usually dredge up threads from channel edges and under larger pass bridges.

The basic tactic is as simple as it gets; all you need is a cutting board and a sharp knife. Whack up the baits into 1-inch chunks and heave them over the side in areas where you have seen or caught reds on recent trips. Some of the better areas for chumming are likely to be outside points and oyster bars, as well as white sandholes in grassflats that get a lot of tidal flow. Sometimes you can also find them right along a channel edge, in areas that most people would never fish for reds. The only areas where chumming is unlikely to work are in protected backwater bays where the current just oozes in and out—without a good flow, the scent of the chum doesn’t travel far and your odds of attracting fish decline.

You’ll probably want to vary your chum presentation based on tide direction. On an outgoing tide, a good bet would be to chum a main runout or slough through the outside bar. Areas like the mouth of Bishop’s Harbor, Double Branch Creek or the winding cut into Cockroach Bay are good bets on Tampa Bay, while at Charlotte Harbor, check out the cuts into Bull and Turtle bays, among many others. The scent will be carried hundreds of yards down the sloughs, and is very likely to lure in all sorts of fish. (Don’t be surprised if a few of them have lines down their sides; though most snook fans might hate to admit it, snook are avid scavengers at times, and readily gulp down dead bait.)