Florida: The Mullet for Whom the Bell Tolls

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Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.

Have you ever seen a 30 pound jack crevalle lock onto, chase down, and destroy a 14 inch mullet? It is remarkable to watch, and perhaps just as remarkable to hear. Slightly less remarkable in sight but more so in sound is when a 20 pound snook decides it wants one of those big mullet. 

Noah and I had experienced the winter snook fishing in the wilds on the west coast, now we were going to get a taste of east coast snook. There are far fewer really wild spots left to fish for snook in East Florida. The Banana River and Mosquito Lagoon are about the last remaining water of that kind, and their integrity has decreased in the past years of poor water management. But further south remain a number of clean water snook strongholds where the environment has very much been shaped by human intervention. Instead of laydowns, cut banks, creek mouths, and deep natural channels, a lot of what we would be fishing was docks, sea walls, mangroves trimmed like hedges, and other man made or man influenced structure. We would come to find out, though, that this made the fishing no less spectacular. 

We paddled down the same river we had fished the week before, intending to reach the point where it opened up into an area loaded with docks and seawalls. As we went, I was amazed by the amount of big horse mullet around. Long daisy chains of finning and splashing mullet filled the river channel. It took mere moments of being in the open cove to hear and see predator fish just slamming those mullet. I had on a clouser. In retrospect, not an ideal fly for he giant jacks and snook that were around, but I was still hoping to pull a new species of some sort out and a small fly gave me a better chance, I thought. A few casts to the seawall and I was on. It was a crevalle jack. A small one, but my personal best. The only other crevalle jack I've caught was no bigger than your average bluegill. This one was a little bigger and gave a good tussle, but I want a huge one. Especially after the things I saw on this trip. 

Caranx hippos

 A little further down the wall I spotted something large approaching me. A little bit of a fin protruded above the surface. It got my heart rate going, I'm not going to lie. I've never been on the water with large sharks before, and we knew there were bulls around. As it approached though and I got a good look at it, I was somewhat taken aback to see that it was actually a massive spotted eagle ray, on the order of a couple hundred pound. I then noticed it was swimming in the direction of my fly. Then I noticed that my line was moving. I had gone and gotten myself in a little bit of a pickle. I tightened up and that ray took off at a rather disturbingly fast pace, pivoting my kayak around as though I had tied up to a submarine. I just buttoned down and hoped the line would break. Instead, the fish just started towing me... not in a good way. It pulled me with such speed and force that my bow end started to dip. With just an inch or two to go before the front tip of my kayak was on very much the wrong side of the surface of the water, my hook bent out. That was close.

I switched to a pink and white Clouser and continued on, picking up a couple ladyfish.

Elops saurus

As I paddled out toward the even more open part of the river I was periodically hearing jacks and snook just slamming mullet against seawalls up and down. Sometimes it was pretty clear that I was hearing and seeing them from as much as a third of a mile away. Isn't that just incredible? But then I got an even more up close view of the action. I paddled into a school of very tightly packed, very nervous mullet. A big jack came flying into the edge of the school, first targeting the stragglers. It slashed right, then left, sending spray high in the air and making a hellacious amount of noise. Then it charged right into the school, sending the mullet running in the only direction they could: out and up. This was when I really wished I had had my camera out. The mullet sprayed just like peanut bunker, but these were foot long fish. In a few seconds they were coming at me, then literally bouncing off the kayak. I inhaled at that moment and could I swear I smelled mullet fear. This was one of the most stunning displays of the predator prey interaction I have ever seen. It makes my really want to get back to Florida for the mullet run to see this on an even more grand scale.

Shortly after that I came into some much clearer water and decided to start targeting barracuda. I knew this area was loaded, but I wasn't completely sure how I should be targeting them. I decided to just rip a deceiver with an extremely fast two hand retrieve. It just wasn't working, though I didn't know yet if it was just me doing something wrong or if there weren't any cuda there. I did see sheephead, a couple black drum, some big mojarra, and snook... so I switched to half heartedly trying to get each of those. The tactics for each differ, so just throwing the same fly and leader at all of them was pretty pointless and I caught nothing. I pointed Noah towards the snook. He had changed to a big spook. He got a hit relatively quickly in fairly shallow water. Then another not much further along, which in retrospect I think was a small cuda. Why? Because when we slide along a sweet looking mangrove line on the other side of the river, this happened:





It was pretty cool to watch, and gave me hope, so I kept throwing small stuff. I also fished some really tiny things because there were a variety of smaller fish around, including at least two pufferfish species, some snappers, and others. I only caught mangrove snapper, unfortunately.

Eventually, seeing more huge jacks just unloading on adult mullet, I broke down finally and tied on a huge howitzer game change. From there, things went very much downhill. Noah found a ton of big snook hanging on one particular dock. He missed one... right around the time a pelican flew into my line, got hooked, and utterly refused to let my help it. The damn bird thrashed its wings, clapped its beak, and gave me the stink eye for five minutes while I tried to unhook it. I tried the known method of grabbing his beak to restrain him. That sucker just wouldn't let me do it. Eventually, it was either flip the kayak, get bit a bunch of times, or cut the line and leave the bird with a huge fly stuck in it. I chose the third option. Honestly, screw you pelican. That was your own doing. To make things more fun, while this was going on Noah hooked into a snook every bit as big as the one I had gotten on New Year's Day. After a short battle in which he definitely did not let the fish tire out enough, he got it on the board where it thrashed hard and threw the hooks. In a panic he tried to grab the fish, which only ended with a serious cut from the snook's gill plate and no snook to photograph. We had gotten done with my nightmare and went over to the same dock, where it didn't take me long to hook into a good snook that I leadered but did not touch. Really, that's where our outing there ended. Noah got a few more missed blowups, I caught a couple small mangrove snapper. Nothing special. We left for some inlet hopping, but we were definitely coming back the next morning.

I decided  not to screw around. This was going to be our last good chance to get some snook on this trip, so I decided to make the best of it and just target snook and jacks. I stuck with big hollow fleyes and it payed off. I found the pattern fast. The snook sat at either two locations: where a dock met a seawall, or a corner on a seawall.

Centropomis undecimalis

That little thing protruding from the surface and the wake is being made by a 150lbe eagle ray.

 I'm not going to lie, I was feeling pretty good about myself on this morning. It certainly wasn't as though I could do no wrong. I did miss a few fish, I made a few poor casts, I came in too hot on a few docks. But this was a fishery I had less than 6 hours of experience on and I was holding my own pretty well. I know of a few people who fish this particular area quite a lot, and I've seen what they catch. I was doing well. I was catching snook. I had gotten better at predicting where they would be. I had gotten better at convincing them to eat. I had gotten better at hooking them. I had gotten really good at fighting them.

I think I've got snook pretty well figured out. I know I have a bit left to learn, I've not yet caught them from the beach and I haven't sight fished to layed up snook. But I think it wouldn't take long to decipher the ins and outs of both. One of the biggest things I took away from this trip was how well I can do when dropped into a new fishery if I'm confident and fish with purpose and intent. I was in a fishery that was almost completely new to me and I was comfortable. I knew that when I watched a big jack come along the wall chasing a mullet, then fling that mullet up so high it was a foot above the level of the lawn atop the wall and catch it on the way down. I was able to just watch and experience it. I was fully content. No need to make a panicked, mediocre cast.

 I wasn't a fish out of water here. But that mullet was, briefly. It was for him that the bell tolled.

mullet school

West Indian manatee, Trichechus manatus