Take Your Pick in Fishing the Flats

When it comes to fishing the flats of Florida or Belize, Costa Rica or Mexico, you can’t do better for a guide than Mr. Henry Waszczuk. If you check out his TV show, Fishing the Flats, you’re guaranteed week after week of exciting trips to far-flung locales all in the pursuit of nature’s most challenging sport fish.

Waszczuk is an unlikely provider of fishing the flats TV. Born in England in’50, he crossed the pond with his family as a toddler. Football was his first love, playing for Kent State, and later professionally, before setting down to teach high school Science for a decade or so. It was around this time he began fishing the flats in Florida and elsewhere.

Still, I didn’t hit gold in fly fishing the flats until I did a little research on the huge importance of tides. What’s going on is that the fish themselves sense tide changes, and they use them to their advantage in searching out their own prey. If I’m serious about fishing the flat waters, I’d better grab me a time table!

Then there’s the thrill known only to the angler who dares to fish the flats of the Florida Keys for tarpon, a creature known to tip the scales at one hundred pounds. Speaking of fishing the flats in Florida, feisty reds can also be found in the mangroves of Clearwater, an experience unequaled for those seeking pristine outdoors scenes.

When fishing the flats in Florida, the choices of site are endless. If you don’t want to worry about tides, you could fish the flats around Mosquito Lagoon, or the Banana River Lagoon. This area is part of the Indian River Lagoon system, world famous for its redfish.

Down around Sanibel and Captiva Island in the southwestern part of the state offers the chance to fish the flats for snook, tarpon and sea trout. To fish the flats here, which are thick with turtle grass and studded with oyster shell bars, is practically guaranteeing catching some redfish, which hunt the baitfish hiding in the oyster shells.

I’ll never forget one morning in particular, last summer, when I spotted a bunch of redfish hanging around a rocky creek mouth, going to town on some mullet. I landed the fly right in front of ‘em, and before you knew it, I was fly fishing the flats like the pros on Fishing the Flats TV.

So, to sum up, once I figured out that the best fishing is usually when the tide is coming in or out, fishing the flat waters around my home has become a blast.

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