Mark Benson fooled this black drum with a soft-plastic bait on a less than ideal day for flats wading.

Dressed for snow blowing, not Florida wade fishing, I found it hard to believe that we’d find frisky schools of hungry drum schooled up in painfully cold shallows. The wind was howling out of the north at 25 knots and the chill factor was in the 20s.

But we braved it because drums have a curious habit of schooling up in the shallows after a freeze, of all times.

“If I get stuck in the mud,” I told pal Capt. Mark Benson, “you’ll have to call a wrecker with a winch to get me out.”

“I feel like an astronaut,” Mark said, wobbling from the SUV with arms stretched out from his side because of the added girth. I was thinking more along the lines of the Pillsbury Doughboy.

We zipped down the Indian River in Benson’s outboard-powered canoe-like Gheenoe, flushing hundreds of cormorants, pelicans and seagulls hunkered down on nearby sandbars. When we arrived at the flat we planned to wade, ladyfish were lying atop the water on their sides, barely finning. It was that cold. Yet mullet, seemingly unscathed, zigzagged crazily just beneath the surface of the water like F-15 fighter jets. There was bait aplenty, but would drum really feed on a day like this?

Hell yes. According to Dr. Grant Gilmore, the scientist who first recorded and created the taxonomic classifications for the 800-some fishes swimming in Treasure Coast, Florida waters, most members of the drum family ( Scianidae spp.) can withstand radical drops in water temps.

“When we had the great freeze of 1977 and it snowed in Grand Bahama, one of our aquaculture ponds at Harbor Branch {Marine Lab} that was full of spotted seatrout ( Cynoscion nebulosus) froze over with ice half an inch thick. The trout did just fine. Conversely, we could never keep fish caught in July for the hatchery alive, yet we had 100% survival on winter-caught fish.”

Black drum ( Pogonias cromis) have an especially impressive range. Anglers catch them in both Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic waters, in habitats as diverse as the Chesapeake bay, Texas hyper-saline flats, the Louisiana bayous, Low Country Marshes, and the Everglades.

Benson repeats the above feat later in the tide.

Gilmore explains that trout, red drum and black drum are “warm temperate estuarine species,” which means they have evolved a physiology that can take a wide temperature range, particularly on the cold side. They run a much higher risk of over-heating in summer than freezing in winter. In fact, in the heat most drums tend to be much more sluggish and reluctant feeders than during cold snaps.

The fish we found on that flat were anything but reluctant feeders. A redfish tailed just ahead, and while Mark made a beeline for it, I spied the tail tips of a pair of black drum on a shallow ridge in the distance. I kept one eye on that spot and the other on Mark.

He waded to within 30 feet of the red, and then dropped a soft-bodied artificial shrimp softly in its path. He twitched the bait, then leaned back and set the hook. The fish made several unusually long runs before giving up. And it bolted out of Mark’s hand the moment he placed it gently into the water and started to revive it.

No one resembling the Pillsbury Doughboy was going to outfish me, so I stood stone still, using my peripheral vision and other senses to scan the water. The winter winds had clouded the water, and I needed a tail to show, or at least swirl. There was a swirl to my right, and then a wet fin tip flashed. The plastic shrimp landed a few feet from the spot, so not to spook the fish or any schoolmates nearby. I raised the rod slowly to swim the shrimp in a natural manner and felt a tap-tap. I reeled up slack, felt weight and set the hook. The drum—which I assumed from the soft bite was a black drum—made short bursts, and each time I got it close to me, it took off again.