Goose Island remains a great wade-fishing destination. Wear stout shoes to fend against the sharp oyster-shell reefs, and shuffle your feet to ward off stingrays.

Another easily accessible spot is the Intracoastal Canal that cuts through the entire Gulf Coast and is often accessible from shoreline pullouts. While there’s less distance to wade along the Intracoastal, it also concentrates the fish. You’ll want to fish live bait or soft plastics along the dropoff from deep water and back into the shallows.

Right in the heart of Rockport, Little Bay remains an excellent wade-fishing spot for beginners. It was here that my family learned to wade-fish in the early 1970s, and it’s still productive for reds and, occasionally, schools of trout. Keep moving until you find the fish -- and don’t expect to have the site to yourself.

The flats on each side of the highway from Aransas Pass to Port Aransas offer vast and easily accessible flats as well. You can virtually “walk to Port A,” catching trout and reds the whole way.

If you’re going solo, consider following the pros by going with high-percentage live bait. But you don’t need croakers or live shrimp to catch trout and reds. I’ve had more glorious days than I can remember, catching limits of both trout and redfish on soft-plastic baits, especially my personal favorite -- the Cocahoe Queen.

This soft mullet-shaped plastic bait -- in two reliable colors: red with a white tail and avocado with red metal-flake -- remains the one bait I flat won’t fish without. Its light jighead enables you to swim it through ankle-deep flats. With a heavier jighead, it’ll cut through rides on the jetties or in deep flats, equally effective. And with a 1/4-ounce jighead, it’s unbeatable for hopping the sandy potholes that hold trout and reds waiting to ambush an unwary baitfish. If you can’t find the Queens, there are several similar versions.

FROM YOUR OWN BOAT
A huge difference in today’s bays, compared to my childhood, is the watercraft plying these waters.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, a bay angler fished an aluminum skiff or a wood-hulled flatbottom. Except for a few enterprising souls building the first flats boats out of single sheets of plywood, those serious about getting shallow went to an airboat.

Today there are hundreds of designs of flats boats, and hundreds of dealers offering every variation of tunnel hull and center console and jack plate and overpowered outboard to take you into any territory damper than a wet sponge.

These new rigs corresponded with the improving fishery, bringing thousands more anglers into popular bays, sometimes both crowding each other and ripping bottom grasses to a muddy pulp. One substantial advantage that a flats boat gives you is access to more isolated pockets of water that have seen less fishing pressure.

The Lighthouse Lakes near Aransas Pass are a prime example. These knee-deep flats stretch for hundreds of acres, but are accessible only with a shallow-running boat and then are too shallow to run -- ideal territory for kayakers.

A number of very shallow lakes -- really tertiary bays -- are in the backside of St. Joseph’s Island. At high tide these little white-sand bays will flood knee-deep, often with redfish and sometimes trout following baitfish into the bays. This can create sight-casting action to rival the best the Florida Keys can offer. Creep along, watching for tailing reds or the wake or shape of feeding trout.