I admit it. I’m extremely lucky to be able to live on the water in Florida. It sure makes fishing easier when you can jump in your boat at the dock, crank up and head out. It saves a lot of time compared to hitching up the trailer and towing the boat to a ramp.

But keeping your boat at your own dock is a mixed blessing. Our condo rules don’t allow boat trailers in the parking lot and the poling platform on my little 16-foot Hewes Redfisher is too tall to fit through the garage door. Hence my mobility is limited to where I can go on the water and in the boat. But I’m not complaining. The Indian River just south of Vero Beach is loaded with fish. Which leads to my question: How far do you go on the water in your boat to find fish?

I hardly ever venture more than a few miles from my dock and more often than not I’m in sight of our condo. I always wonder as I drift across the flats after a 10-minute high-speed run to a favorite weed bed or drop off where all those boats ripping up and down the Intracoastal Waterway are going. Don’t they know the fish are right here where I’m fishing?

To be fair, on a Saturday or Sunday when the weather is good the nearest public boat ramps, at Round Island and at Fort Pierce, are chockablock with trucks and trailers. If everybody who launched their boat on a Saturday morning fished within in a one-mile radius of the ramp, you could just walk across the boats until you find an open patch of water to make a cast. But does it make sense to run five, six miles or 10 miles from the ramp?

Every so often, if I’ve gotten bored with my usual routine, I’ll settle back with the throttle wide open and go somewhere different. I even hired a guide to teach me how to fish Fort Pierce Inlet, which is about seven miles from my dock. The swift tidal currents, the jetties and the deep shipping channel make for a completely different environment and it can be fun to play there for awhile. But I’ve seldom caught as many fish in a five-hour trip to the inlet as I can catch in a two-hour span closer to home. And as I’m running down the waterway toward the jetty, I can’t help but think how many fish I’m passing. To give you an idea of how stuck in the mud I am, I haven’t even made the 12-mile run north to Sebastian Inlet, one of the state’s great fishing locations. And with gasoline prices doing what they are, I might never make it that far.