"You can fish up in a creek like that if it's big enough, and if you can get a boat in there, for most people, you'll be fishing overlooked water," Nelson said. "If you don't know for sure, it's better to go up on a rising tide."

Rising water pushes baitfish and game fish deeper into creeks and ditches and scatters them over a wider area of the bottom, but in the case of smaller side creeks, it also opens up new water.

"Flounder won't usually get back in the (marsh) grass on the sides of the channel," Nelson said. "You're really looking for little bends in the creek and sandbars. And if a little creek is big enough for a boat, it will have more little tributaries running into it that you can fish. You fish all of them."

Nelson's preference is to fish side channels on falling water because as the tide drops and water is sucked out of the surrounding marsh, baitfish have to move with the current and head out of the grass toward the main channel. The mouth of a side channel is a perfect spot to find game fish taking advantage of the inexorable flow of food toward deep water.

"The water level really matters," Nelson said. "I like it when it really starts flowing out of the grass. Once the water drops out of the grass, there's nothing to drain anymore. There won't be any more bait coming out of the grass.

"I usually won't anchor up on a little creek or a ditch," he said. "If I can get a good drift, I'll make a couple of casts toward the mouth of that ditch. If you can get two good casts in there, you'll have your shot.

"I will usually make one long cast up into the ditch before I begin my drift, then I'll work around the mouth," he said. "As I'm coming up to it, I'll cast off the side of the boat and just let the bait drift along with the boat -- as slow as I can, as slow as the current will let me. You have to keep a tight line and let the current carry the bait along because you want to fish it very slowly.

"If you pick up a fish on the first drift, you go back and drift again. You can catch several fish out of a hole like that."

Oyster bars are the third flounder hangout and Nelson's least favorite -- unless he happens not to mind catching puppy drum (redfish), which also love oyster rocks.

"There are a couple of oyster beds that, when I'm fishing for drum, I'll stop and fish them for flounder," he said. "On straight stretches of bank, they'll be just good little sand flats sticking out with decent-sized oyster beds. That's the kind of structure that will hold little minnows.

"How you fish it depends on how the bar is lying. You want to set up on the downcurrent side and cast up, but not into the oyster shells."

Flounder won't set up in the shells; they'll be on the sandy bottom off the edge of the oysters. Redfish will normally be right up in the oysters, because they're cruising a few inches off the bottom, searching for food. Flounder set up on the bottom and let the food come to them.