Finding Spillways...
I'm really lucky to live in an old neighborhood called Crescent Heights in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Construction here began in the early twenties, and it was one of the first real neighborhoods in what was a rapidly-growing residential area near the mouth of Tampa Bay. The reason for putting houses here is simple to seem even though it's nearly 100 years later; Crescent Lake (after which the neigborhood was named) is spring-fed lake above sea level.
Something you learn pretty quickly is that water runs downhill. This is apparent nowhere in the entire bay area where we're based than it does in the hills above Coffepot Bayou. There might be more drainage-conscious neigborhoods in the United States, but I haven't found one. We have grouper sewers. Grouper-sewers, you ask? Grouper sewers.
You can see on this topographic map that from Coffeepot Bayou -- obviously at sea level -- sits below a ridge that's as high as 50' above the fishy spot. That means that water falling in our neigborhood spills directly into the bay. It "chokes" at certain places. These chokes are called "Spillways". We've done a FishySpot map for the best ones in the bay area.
Spillways aren't a common thing you hear discussed on forums or in the tackle shops we populate. That's an interesting fact, since knowing about Spillways -- where they are, how, and when to fish them -- will definitely increase the number of big, strong, and very healthy fish you'll get to fight and release in your fishing lifetime. The spillways we're going to talk about happen to be within 50 miles of each other, and they're all around Tampa Bay, on the west central Coast of Florida, but they exist everywhere, and anywhere they exist and they pour fresh water into salty water, the same thing is going to happen: fish are going to be there and they're going to be eating.
