Now is the favorite time of year for many saltwater anglers because mullet are showing up along South Florida beaches.
The baitfish swim south along the Atlantic coast before heading offshore to spawn, but not all of them make it that far.
As the schools migrate, they get attacked by a variety of predators, including bluefish, Spanish mackerel, jacks, tarpon, spinner sharks, snook and ladyfish.
That’s one of the things that makes fishing the fall mullet run so much fun: Anglers never know what they might catch.
The other big attraction is that anglers don’t need a boat; they can catch those fish from beaches and piers, as well as bridges and seawalls.
The beauty of fishing from a boat is anglers can run up and down the coast looking for mullet, and when they find them, they can stay with the school.
Boaters can also fish around bridges more easily than land-based anglers when mullet are plentiful in the Intracoastal Waterway and the canals connected to it. One of the best ways to fish bridges is to cast-net some mullet, hook one through the lips and let it drift with the current to the bridge, where tarpon and snook are often waiting to ambush the baits.
Beach anglers rely on information from each other to find out where the mullet are located and where they are headed.
In the old days, before cell phones, that was hard to do. Anglers could either go to the beach and hope the mullet were there or wait for a phone call from someone who lived in a beachfront condo when the mullet showed up. Rarely did an angler stop fishing and walk to a pay phone to tell friends what was happening.
Now, friends alert each other when the mullet are off the beaches and the fish are biting.
It was a call from Terry Luneke that had Steve Kantner and me driving from Fort Lauderdale to Jupiter a few days ago. Luneke said that mullet had moved along the beach for the past three days and he had caught bluefish every day.
We all arrived at the beach at the same time. No mullet schools were visible, but there was plenty of other bait in the water and small jacks were feeding on them.
Kantner has a chapter devoted to surf fishing in his excellent book “Ultimate Guide to Fishing South Florida on Foot,” which is available at some local tackle stores and online.
He graciously rigged my two spinning rods for me, one with a 5/8th-ounce Krocodile spoon, which is a beach fishing standard.
The other outfit had a rig developed by Luneke consisting of an orange foam float, an egg sinker below it and a swivel. A 4-foot leader was tied to the swivel and to a small spoon. The float creates noise as it’s reeled in and when fish investigate, they go after the spoon trailing behind it.
That combo produced numerous jacks for the three of us, many of them hitting the spoon by the first trough, which was about 10 feet off the beach.
Later that afternoon, some boats showed up to the north of us and we saw that they were on a school of mullet, which appeared as a dark blotch in the water. Luneke said it wasn’t as big or as fast as the schools he’d seen the previous three days, which had moved quickly down the beach.
We waited, and when the school came within casting range, we fired out our rigs. Luneke caught two bluefish, then followed the school to the south a little ways, but that was it.
Bluefish would occasionally charge into the mullet that lingered behind, sending the baitfish airborne, but none of them was interested in our lures.
That was OK, because I was happy with the jacks. And the mullet run will only get better.
swaters@sun-sentinel.com or Twitter @WatersOutdoors
