Meeting Captain Roy
I’ve fished with a lot of guides over the years, but only one fundamentally changed how I see water. Captain Roy Hawkins spent 30 years running charter trips on the Alabama Gulf Coast, and the four days I spent with him in 2018 taught me more about fish behavior than the previous two decades of fishing on my own. He passed away last year, and I’ve been thinking about the lessons he left me.
I booked Roy for an inshore redfish trip because someone at the marina said he was the best teacher on the coast. Not the best at catching fish—though he was excellent at that too—but the best at explaining why fish were where they were and how to find them yourself. “I’m not interested in clients who just want me to put them on fish,” he told me on our first morning. “I want clients who want to learn.”
The First Lesson: See the Water, Not Just the Surface
We idled into a broad flat that looked completely featureless to me—just an expanse of grass and oyster shell stretching to the horizon. Roy cut the engine and said, “Tell me what you see.” I looked around and saw nothing remarkable. Grass, water, sky.
“You’re looking at the surface,” he said. “Look at the water.” He pointed to a subtle color change about fifty yards away, a slightly darker green that I’d dismissed as a cloud shadow. “That’s a depression. Maybe six inches deeper than the surrounding flat. On this tide, at this time of day, fish will be sitting right on the edge of that depression, facing into the current, waiting for shrimp to wash past.”
We paddled the trolling motor over silently, and sure enough, there were three redfish tailing right where the flat dropped into the depression. I’d never have seen them without Roy pointing them out, and I definitely wouldn’t have found that spot on my own.
Reading Current and Structure
Over the next three days, Roy taught me to see a dozen features I’d been blind to: current seams where two flows met and created feed zones, subtle points in the grass that concentrated baitfish, deeper pockets along oyster bars where reds would hold during low tide, sandy patches that indicated harder bottom where flounder would lie flat.
Each lesson built on the previous one. By day three, I was calling out likely spots before Roy pointed to them. “There,” I’d say, indicating a color change or a swirl in the grass. “That’s where they’ll be.” And more often than not, fish would appear right where I predicted.
The Tidal Clock
Roy’s most valuable lesson was about tide timing. He could predict fish movements with remarkable accuracy based on the tidal clock—not just whether it was high or low, but exactly where in the cycle we were and how that affected specific spots. “This flat fishes for two hours on the incoming, starting about an hour after low,” he’d say. “Then the fish slide off to that deeper channel until the tide turns. You could fish here all day at high tide and never see a red.”
He had this knowledge for dozens of spots, each with its own tidal window. It was like having a cheat code for the entire marsh. I started keeping notes, building my own database of tide-dependent locations. That notebook has become one of my most valuable fishing possessions.
The Legacy
Roy wasn’t just teaching me to catch redfish. He was teaching me to think like a predator, to understand the ecosystem as an interconnected system of cover, current, temperature, and food sources. Every fishing trip since then, whether I’m chasing largemouth in Tennessee or bonefish in the Bahamas, I apply the framework Roy gave me.
Where would a fish want to be right now? Where’s the food coming from? Where’s the cover? How does the water move? These questions, asked constantly, have made me a fundamentally better angler.
Finding Your Own Guide
If you want to accelerate your fishing education, find a guide like Roy—someone who views teaching as part of the job, not just fish-catching. Ask questions constantly. Take notes. Pay attention not just to where you’re fishing but why you’re fishing there. The best guides are generous with their knowledge if you show genuine interest in learning. Roy certainly was, and I think of him every time I read the water correctly and find fish where I expect them to be.
