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What I need to catch is a redfish. But here, in the slow current of the creek bend, I am hooking snook after snook.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” says Willcox. “The snook are biting like crazy.” He looks at me. “I’ve never said that before in my life.”

We motor through open water to a heavily shoaled shoreline. We have to anchor the boat and walk through shallows to get to the mouth of a tiny mangrove- and cypress-lined flowage that Willcox says is home to my redfish.

The outgoing tide is very warm, exposing shoals that are ankle-deep with seashells that would cost a dollar each at a Miami airport souvenir shop. Along the shoreline I see cuts and holes, channels and dropoffs, eddies and deadfalls. We haven’t seen another fisherman in hours. I want to stay right here for the next four to six weeks and fish it all. But Willcox points to the creek. “Cast a shrimp upcurrent,” he says. I slowly wade toward the mouth, working the waist-deep water as I go. On my fourth cast my line wraps around an overhanging mangrove branch, and I have to cross to the steep opposite bank to free it.

I swing the rod to loop the line off the branch, and that, of course, is when the redfish sucks in the shrimp.

The creek is about 10 feet wide, the red is about 6 pounds, and I can see about 300 places for him to wrap me. But I’m not going to lose this fish, which now wants to swim back through the Everglades and all the way to Lake Okeechobee. I hear Willcox rapidly sloshing through the water toward me. “Just beach it!” he’s yelling.

I’d once lost a 5-pound smallmouth trying to do just that on a Pennsylvania lake when my landing net was lying forgotten somewhere, but I have no other option. I crank down on the fish and in one motion sweep the rod back, take two steps up, and drag the red onto the bank. Then I fall like a sack of cement so my body is between water and fish, and pin it with my forearm. Willcox gets there a few seconds later. “Smooth,” he says. “You’re not ready for AARP yet!”

By the time we get back to the dock, I’ve reached 27 species. More than halfway, and time to get out on the big water.