Snook may be plentiful, but you must have a plan no matter where you fish

A big reason snook is the favorite saltwater fish of Florida’s recreational anglers is that the species flourishes everywhere from mangrove-lined creeks to metropolitan canals.

On the surface, those habitats could not be more different. Look below, as Dave Justice does, and you will see that city snook is no different from its backcountry cousins. Therein lies the secret of Justice’s snook-catching success, which can help you land a keeper when the snook season in South Florida opens Sept. 1. (Visit www.myfwc.com/fishing/saltwater/recreational/snook for size and bag limits.)

“Throw this plug as close to that seawall as you can, then just reel it in with a steady retrieve,” Justice told me under the nighttime Miami sky. “I bet you get one on the first cast.”

I heaved the silver, shallow-running plug a foot from the seawall and started reeling. The lure hadn’t gone 10 feet when a snook pounced on it, then headed back to the seawall.

Justice backed up the boat as I tried to guide the snook from the seawall. The fish swung around and came to the boat, then went under the boat, forcing me to plunge the tip of the 20-pound spinning rod in the water so the line didn’t scrape the bottom of the boat.

Fortunately, the snook circled and came out on the same side. A minute later, the 13-pounder was in the boat, the 7-inch plug’s rear treble hook embedded in its jaw.

“How did you know there was a snook there?” I asked Justice, who was smiling as broadly as if he had caught the fish.

“There’s a ledge out there,” Justice said, explaining that the water depth went from 14 feet to two feet, creating a flat along the seawall. “What those fish are doing is waiting on the flat and using the current as a conveyor belt to bring the food to them.

“Usually they’ll lay on the deep side of a ledge. Through trial and error, I found out they’ll sometimes lay on the shallow side.”

Take away the condominiums on the corner, the rumble of traffic over a nearby bridge and the occasional wail of a police siren and we could’ve been in the Ten Thousand Islands. The canal would have been a creek, the seawall would have been a mangrove island and the snook would have been waiting in the same place.

Growing up in Miami Shores, Justice fished the backcountry of Southwest Florida only a handful of times. Almost all of his snook fishing was done from the seawalls, jetties and bridges around the Intracoastal Waterway from Miami to Stuart.

“I never got into the backcountry West Coast thing,” Justice said.

He didn’t have to. By applying the same principles that work so well in the backcountry to metropolitan areas, Justice became an accomplished snook fisherman. According to his records, through a 10-year period, Justice caught more than 500 snook weighing 30 or more pounds.

As he demonstrated on this night, many of the spots that produced for him decades ago are still productive. Those spots usually are distinguished by their water flow, lights or bottom structure. Sometimes they have all three features.

Good water flow, or current, brings shrimp and small fish to snook. Lights attract baitfish. Bottom structure, such as ledges, humps and holes, allows snook to ambush its prey. Justice locates the latter spots by studying charts, which indicate changes in the bottom, as well as by casting a jig and letting it tell him what’s on the bottom.

At one bridge there was good flow through the center span, shrimp in the water and bright white lights above. On his first cast with a plastic shrimp tail on a jig, Justice caught an 11-pounder.

That bridge also yielded some smaller snook, as did another bridge nearby. Close to where I caught my 13-pounder, the same plug produced a 15-pounder. A corner of a seawall accounted for several more snook.

“I look for irregularities in seawalls; massive bends and abrupt angle changes that allow current breaks,” Justice said. “And I keep looking for new spots because the old spots change over the years and the fish move.”

Justice’s choice of lures has remained the same: jigs, either with bucktails or plastic bodies, and plugs.

“A jig is my favorite snook lure because it gets to the bottom, you can make repeated casts into a prime zone and you don’t have to worry about it swimming to the surface [like a live bait] when it’s chased by a fish,” Justice said.

When using jigs, Justice uses braided line, which has good abrasion resistance. Unlike monofilament line, braid has virtually no stretch, which results in terrific sensitivity. That translates into bone-jarring bites and a night to remember.