The flats and islands that create the Choctawhatchee River’s multiple mouths have become our favorite fishing area because we can get protection from winds, and our canoe can skim over the very shallow areas even at low tide.

TIPS
Anglers fishing from a boat with live baits do have a couple of advantages over those using a smaller paddle craft. To begin with, having a live well makes it much easier to use the fresh baits that trout love. We used to carry live shrimp in a trolling bucket, but gave up on that because of the extra drag on the canoe.

Instead, we now cast jigs to the edges of grasslines or shell bars and toss spoons into the grass. To get longer casts, we use 8-pound-test. So far, we’ve caught about as many trout on artificials as we used to do with live bait.

Another bonus for fishermen in larger vessels is the opportunity to use some of their live baits as chum. Tossed out on the water, those stunned or disoriented baitfish are easy targets for trout or redfish. This allows the anglers to discover any feeding fish in a given area.

We’ve tried throwing out a handful of thawed shrimp in a likely-looking spot to see what happened, but gave up on that idea too. Fishing from a canoe, we find that casting jigs and spoons covers so much water that it tells us what we want to know, and we don’t waste time chumming.

TROUT
Early morning and late evening are the best times for catching trout. Choctawahatchee bay has many mouths of coves, inlets and bayous, and the specks tend to hide in the passes At these times, casting topwater lures -- like pencil poppers or even deer-hair flies typically used for largemouth bass on a fly rod -- works well.

The Clouser Minnow is another fly that works well for speckled trout early in the morning. Another trick to double your chances with the long rod is to tie on a pencil popper, then a Clouser as a dropper. The popping bug then works much like a popping cork to attract the trout to the streamer fly. And you may pick up fish on the topwater fly as well.

The specks respond to a pretty quick retrieve. Work the setup off the banks and weeds where the water is about 3 feet deep. This noisy two-fly setup can call the trout out of the nearby cover.

When fishing for specks with spinning gear, especially during midday, you may have to go to live bait to provoke any action. Shrimp, alewife, finger mullet and bull minnows all are good choices for taking trout from deeper waters. You can use a cast net to get those baits, since they’re usually plentiful in the summer.

A big speck in the bay weighs 6 pounds. We’ve caught a lot of 3-pound fish, but you have a chance at some of the bigger ones. In this part of Florida, seatrout must be between 15 inches and 20 inches to be harvested, but you can keep one longer than 20 inches in your five-fish-per- day creel limit.