Chico Fernandez has been writing about snook for half a century, and the rig he’s described for the spookiest clear-water pocket fish is unusually specific: a Puglisi baitfish in white with a green or tan back, 2½ to 4 inches long, on a 12-foot leader and a 6-weight clear floating line. That’s a setup most fly anglers would assume is for bonefish. It isn’t — it’s Fernandez’s clear-water snook rig, and once you’ve spent a morning watching laid-up pocket fish refuse a 2/0 Clouser, it starts to look less eccentric and more like a quiet correction to the way most of us tie for snook.

The fix comes in three parts. The fly is smaller than the standard mangrove baitfish. It’s translucent rather than opaque. And it lands quieter on the surface because it’s tied with less weight at the eyes. Those are the three words in the title of this piece, and Fernandez has been saying versions of them since the eighties. The rest of the modern Florida tying canon — Norm Zeigler in the nineties, Tim Borski through the two-thousands, Drew Chicone in the last fifteen years — has more or less caught up.