Behind the island lies Florida Bay: thousands of acres of flats, creeks, and basins in park water. Calm, shallow, teeming, and all but empty of boats.
A backcountry day is the opposite of a rough offshore ride. You slide across protected water past mangrove islands and wading birds, and the fishing happens in feet of water, not hundreds. It is the trip for anglers who love the hunt, families who want calm water, and anyone who wants to see the Everglades side of the Keys that the highway never shows.
The targets rotate with the season: snook laid up along the mangroves, redfish tailing on the flats, sea trout over the grass, small tarpon rolling in the creeks, and sharks patrolling the edges. Brian has fished this bay for fifty years, and the difference shows in how few dead spots your day contains.
Because the bay is protected, backcountry trips run on days the ocean side would cancel. Windy week, queasy crew, small kids: this is the answer, and it is fishing with training wheels for nobody. Some of the best anglers in the world fly here just for this water.
Excellent: calm water, constant scenery, and plenty of action-sized fish.
Much of Florida Bay is park water and Brian is set up to fish it legally and lightly.
Then this is the perfect classroom. Light tackle, shallow water, and a captain who has taught hundreds of first-timers.
Captain Key Largo and The Poppa Wahoo Collective are the same family, an island apart. Brian runs the flats and the backcountry out of Key Largo. The offshore fleet, two Hatteras sportfishers, works out of Islamorada 20 minutes south.