From the poling platform, you can always see the channel--on the far side of a maze.

Thomas Maybank graduated from the University of the South, Sewanee two years before the dean handed me a diploma, and his early career inspired me to become the best damn fishing bum I could possibly be. During my junior and senior years, Thomas tormented me with postcards from exotic places where he “worked” as an itinerant fly-fishing guide. He scrawled fish stories on their backs recounting epic battles with species such as Alaskan king salmon, Argentine dorado and Mongolian taiman, and the cards always hinted at the next adventure. He seemed to be on a perpetual quest for an angling paradise, and I lost track of him.

Last summer, I caught a 43-inch redfish fly fishing in Savannah, Georgia with another old friend, Capt. Scott Wagner. When Scott said, “Wait til I rub this one in on Maybank,” I just about fell out of the skiff. It seems there’s a Low Country rivalry between Georgia guides and their counterparts on the other side of the Broad River in South Carolina, and that Scott and my college fishing buddy are friendly antagonists. Having repeatedly experienced excellent redfishing in Savannah, I wanted to wet a fly line in the Palmetto State. Considering all the places Thomas has fished he surely had settled in Beaufort for a good reason.

On a brisk late-October day, Thomas, Scott and I ran up St. Helena Sound to the Harbor River at the crack of noon. (You gotta love those humongous, Low Country tides; when low water doesn’t happen until late afternoon, they allow for downright gentlemanly fishing hours after a reunion lasts too long.) The river is wider and more sweeping than the Georgia rivers I’ve fished and the watershed seemed at first to lack their diversity of habitats. We flew past many fishy-looking grassy points, but the oyster rakes, mudflats and spartina grassflats that also characterize the South Carolina marshes were still concealed by the flood tide.

To kill time, we stopped where a creek led from one sun-splashed pond to another and worked the mouth for speckled trout. The tide was dead high and the only motion came from a dazzling glare on the wind ridges. Bouncing a Clouser Minnow like a jig off the dropoff quickly yielded a couple of slot-sized trout. Scott and I were content; despite the fact that seatrout fight only slightly better than the French, light tippet has a way of communicating that sharp, initial trout tug so directly that a picture of the ambush forms in the mind’s eye.

After a couple of fish, Thomas told us to change to lighter redfish flies. There was a sense of urgency in his voice that Scott understood. Both Georgia and South Carolina marshes experience tides that exceed 9-foot fluctuations. High water allows for short cuts to hotspots, and, you can’t fish too late into the outgoing tide unless you enjoy skiff camping.

“ Listen to it run,” Scott said. Indeed, by the time I’d changed flies, oyster clusters poked through the surface, and the water hissed around them. While clipping off the tippet’s tag end, an oyster started a belching contest that carried on across the bay as more and more of the mollusks were exposed. (And that’s exactly what they’re doing; without water passing through their siphons they suck air into their innards and must expel it.) We made a 10-minute run up a creek not much wider than the skiff and one channel in a labyrinth. As we ran, the oyster mounds seemed to rise higher and higher out of the skinny water. A seemingly infinite number of round shallow basins form between these monumental mounds—which to the best of my knowledge aren’t found in the complex but open Georgia marshes.

“There’s danger around every corner,” Scott said. “I wondered how much Thomas spends per year on gelcoat.”

There were plenty of redfish around the corners, too.