In all honesty, there are many days when I wish I had never heard the word "sardine." In fact, until about 20 years ago, the only sardines most Florida anglers knew about came in cans with either mustard or barbecue sauce, and they were a lunchtime alternative to Vienna sausages.
Today, there are thousands of west coast anglers who will not go fishing for snook, reds or trout unless they have a livewell packed with hundreds of sardines—and the virus is spreading. East coast snookers, Everglades guides, blackfin tuna chasers in the Keys and others are learning that a remarkable assortment of gamefish have a deadly fascination for Harengula jaguana, also known as the whitebait and the pilchard.

The scaled sardine is the "miracle bait" that has accounted for the capture of hundreds of thousands of snook as well as countless numbers of reds and trout. It is also, in the view of many artificial lure anglers, the bait that has all but ruined some once-great fisheries; the tactics employed by the hundreds of livebait guides, quickly picked up by their local clients, have overwhelmed traditional tactics.

Of course, it's already an old song. When the jig fishermen came to Boca Grande, it was the beginning of the end for the traditional livebait fishery. Plastic worms made it tough for topwater bass anglers, and so on. Life marches on. So, forthwith, here is how it's done, for better or worse. As anglers, each of us has to decide what works, both practically and morally, if the latter term can be applied to fishing. One thing is sure: The livebait genie is out of the bottle, and it can't be put back or ignored.

FINDING BAIT

The scaled sardine is a relatively durable species in the livewell, has lots of flash, and seems irresistably appetizing to a wide variety of fish. They're caught by anglers primarily on the outer edges of grassflats, typically in water three to six feet deep, though when the spring migration is on they are sometimes found over deeper grass, to 10 feet, and sometimes in open water.

Scaled sardines seem to prefer clear water with a relatively high salinity; move too far into "black water" and they become harder to find. Thus, flats just inside the barrier islands are often the preferred hunting grounds for sardine fans.

'Dines also hang around channel markers, often mixed with other bait species including threadfins, a.k.a. greenbacks on the west coast—Opisthonema oglinum, scientifically speaking. If you're new to livebaiting, it's important to know the difference between threads and sardines, because threads die quickly when placed in the well and 'dines do not; the thread on the dorsal fin and the smaller eye of the threads are the most obvious characteristics.

In the winter, sardines are tough to find, but deep bridge pilings sometimes hold plenty. On Tampa Bay, many guides daily make the 15-mile run to the Sunshine Skyway, net their bait, and then motor back inshore to their snook holes.

Scaled sardines, unlike plankton-feeding threadfins, are attracted by chum, and some of the best is made from a loaf of whole wheat bread, a couple ounces of menhaden oil, and a can of jack mackerel, with enough salt water added to make a watery paste. (Mix this in a plastic bucket with a snap-on lid and you can then fit it into a large ice chest, saving your chum for several days of fishing.)

There's a certain science to chumming sardines; too much is as bad as too little. Scott Moore, the Copernicus of sardine fishing, advises flipping over a wad about the size of your thumbnail once a minute or so, followed by a "golfball" wad just before you're ready to toss the net. The baits swarm in on the sudden abundance of food, and the net comes right behind. For effective chumming, you need a flat where there's strong tide flow, of course. It's often possible on calm mornings to see the fish flipping on the surface as they feed—this is not the "rainstorm" effect seen in large schools of feeding threadfins, but it's an obvious surface disturbance. It's also possible to see the flash of feeding sardines once you get a bit of sun.

Most anglers use 10- to 12-foot castnets, 1/2- to 3/4-inch stretched mesh, to capture the 3- to 4-inch sardines that make the best bait for inshore species. Big trick is never to use a mesh that's too big for the bait that's available—and in spring, it can be pretty small. Many serious sardiners own three nets and change sizes with the growth of the bait.

When baits are around structure or in water so deep that castnetting is tough, sabiki rigs do the job. Sardines readily grab the tiny gold hooks, and if you use a tiny dehooker to flip them off and into the well, they make excellent baits. Avoid touching them while unhooking, if you can.

LIVELY LIVEWELLS

Catching 500 baits is one thing, keeping them alive long enough to go fishing another. Livewells carrying 30 to 60 gallons are a must to hold large numbers of sardines. So is a strong flow-through pump that constantly pulls in clean water and flushes out waste. The well must be circular or oval, because those baits are going to go around and around and around; they swim constantly, and if they stop, they're dead.

Getting baits into the well can be a challenge, too. The best tactic is to have a well with a large door, and a platform that allows you to stand over the well and shake the baits down into it, without ever touching them. Captain Chet Jennings of Ruskin uses a plastic dishpan placed near the bow, where he throws the net. Chet shakes the baits into the pan, and an assistant then quickly transports these baits to the well. Shaking the bait out on the deck and then hand-picking them works, but many die from this extra handling.

LIVE CHUMMING

The tactic that creates the greatest success from the use of sardines is live chumming. This single trick has made great snook anglers out of thousands of folks who couldn't have found a snook in their bathtub before the livebait era. You anchor in an area uptide from a shore that looks "snooky," pull out a half dozen baits with a small dipnet, give them a little squeeze to slightly cripple them, and then toss them over to drift over the suspected hotspot. If the snook (or reds or trout) are there, they'll come boiling up to inhale the free meal. Now you know where they are; you've practically won the battle. (Scott Moore offers words of wisdom here: Slide the baits over the side instead of winging them through the air when gulls are around, and do not overchum; you'll attract birds instead of fish.)

HOOKING YOUR BAITS

Shortshank livebait hooks, including Octopus styles and circle hooks, are the preferred weapon for live sardines. Size 1/0 is common, but if the baits are small you might go to size 1, and if large to size 2/0. The idea is to use the smallest hook that will penetrate the fish's jaw, because the less steel the bait is carrying, the livelier it will be in the water.

Sardines have a clear spot between the eyes and the nostrils that is tougher than the rest of their head, and this is the place to slip in the hook. If you hit this spot, the bait will stay on the hook for a half-dozen casts. Miss it and you'll sail a free chummer out there on the first cast. When the bite is slow and there's minimal current, some anglers hook the bait just above the pectoral fin, which gives them a more frantic swimming action, but shortens their life span on the hook. Used where there's too much current, this hookup causes the baits to spin.

Light spinning tackle is the best gear, and most pros these days use 10-pound-test microfiber running line, with 2 or 3 feet of clear mono or fluorocarbon leader in 20- to 30-pound test.

Most anglers fish sardines freelined in the backcountry, though some use a small foam slip-cork to help them keep track of the travels of the bait.

How often should you change bait?

"As soon as it quits swimming strong," advises Captain John Griffith of Tampa. "The livelier that bait is, the more often you'll get a hit."

HOOKUP!

When a snook or a redfish takes a sardine, there's usually no question about it. You may see the bait come racing to the surface, then a second later it disappears in a boil and the rod doubles over. Best thing to do when this happens?

According to Captain Dave Markett of Tampa: "Nothing."

Markett and many other guides actually prefer that anglers leave the rods in the rod holder and let the fish hook themselves when they are using circle hooks, which most do these days. The pressure from the rod causes the hook to slide along the fish's jaw and bury in the corner of the mouth about 90 percent of the time. Few fish are missed, and those that are not going to be kept are easy to unhook and release without harming them.

Some anglers are concerned that live bait causes more gut-hooking than fishing with artificials, but in my experience it's rare for a fish to get gut-hooked on a circle hook. I would guess that no more fish are gut-hooked on live sardines than on plastic-tailed jigs, for example, which can do a number on trout when used in deep water by inexperienced anglers. And of course you have only one hook to remove instead of six as on treble-hook plugs, so it probably all balances out.

ETHICS OF RALLYING

Because live bait often makes it easy to turn on fish, even after they have been spooked, many anglers owning tower boats have developed the very destructive habit of "rallying," running the flats and looking for fish. When they buzz a hole and flush the fish out, they give it 10 or 15 minutes to settle down, then go back, throw out a bunch of chum, and often get any fish that have come back to bite.

But this tactic is very hard on the grassflats where water is shallow—and in fact is illegal in many areas where boats are supposed to operate at idle speed or on trollers or pushpole. It's also very hard on other anglers attempting to fish anywhere on the flats that are being buzzed; fish that get spooked two or three times during a tide are very difficult to approach and catch, particularly on artificials.

Does rallying cause long-term damage to local fisheries? That one is still being kicked around the Internet chat rooms, but there's no doubt that boats repeatedly buzzing a school of redfish, for example, break the fish up into smaller and smaller pods and send many of them back to deep water. That is very likely the reason it's so rare to encounter the "red wave" coming across the flats these days. It was common 15 years ago before widespread towerboating and when there were far fewer boats of all types running the flats. Unless anglers change their ways, this effect will only become more pronounced in the future.