There’s a Hole In the Bottom of the Sea

Jeff Tilley

It’s not often that my nearly grown teen son wants to get out on the water with me.  Truth is I was so independent when I was his age that I left home, striking out on my own.  I was too hard-headed to know any better.  Thankfully, he has a better head on his shoulders – probably thanks to his mom.  I left home not long before turning 18 and never went back.  Looking in the rear view mirror, I’m not sure now that my mile-wide independent streak has served me that well in life.  What a blessing that he does not seem to have the same disposition.

Nevertheless, between school, work, girlfriend, church, hog hunting and chores, there isn’t a lot of time left in the day to kayak mullet fish with dear old dad.  But, when we do manage to find the time, it becomes a day or evening full of memories. 

His mom and I still laugh that one of the first fully developed words he ever uttered as a toddler was the word “out”.  He was standing at the back door of our house in Pensacola, looking through the glass, when he turned and looked at us and said “OUT!”  It has been that way ever since.  I have never had to worry about dragging that boy from in front of the television and banishing him to the out-of-doors.  It’s been more of a problem to get him to slow down long enough to come inside and get a good eight hours of sleep.

We both saw about a week in advance that there was set to be a negative .7 tide in the harbor.  We both knew what that meant.  A negative .7 literally drains the water out of the bay.  Where we like to fish, the Harbor would be as dry as a bone.  So we put in the kayaks early in the day, while the harbor was still flooded, and paddled across to the bars and marsh islands on the other side.  Soon, we were seeing the telltale swirls of the fishy protests that mullet like to give when you enter their kingdom.

The day was beautiful.  It was late May.  The air was warm and the water was still cool.  The fish had returned to the top end of the Harbor and were awaiting our pursuit.  We had an afternoon to kill before the tide would really start ripping out, and with all the water that was in the bay at that moment, the fish were hard to come by.  But right on time, the water began to roll out of the bay.

We positioned ourselves in one of our favorite places to intercept fish.  It is a pinch point where the fish are required to scoot by us on their way out of one of the many channels.  We would cast on swirls and miss.  We would blind cast and miss.  It seemed as though Mr. Mullet was going to give his human pursuers a real run for their money that afternoon.  In the space of three hours, we had probably only managed to catch three fish.  We finally decided to move.

There is a very large creek channel that drains a good portion of that part of the harbor.  The creek empties out into the bay through a series of oyster bars that form a mouth that is two hundred feet wide.  Directly between the two bars, the tidal action of the bay scours a fairly deep hole that can be over your head on a medium high tide.  But a little further up, the water becomes characteristically shallow again and remains so for the half mile that it courses to the very top end of the marsh with one exception – a very large and very deep artificial hole that was dug by dragline years ago against the west bank of the channel.  We began to work up that big creek.

The first fish of the day that I caught was a very nice red.  I could immediately tell that I had a red in the net from its muscular thrashing.  I fish with a pocket net, and as soon as I yanked the net out of the water, I could see the big fish in the pocket.  I took him straight to the hill.  The one thing you don’t want to do with a red is slide your fingers up his gills to hold him while you subdue him for the ice box.  He’s got an organ inside his throat that is used for cracking the shells of crustaceans when he eats.  If you slide your fingers in there, he’ll make you pay the price!

Once I had him up on the oyster bar, the fight was over and he was ready for the ice box on the back of the kayak.  One tug of the string tether, and the kayak glided to me in the shallow water and red was packed away.  One in the box.  Reid, on the other side of the channel, was catching a few mullet.  He had also caught a white trout.  No such luck for me.

As the sun dropped lower in the sky, the water was barreling out of the bay.  Just about dark, or a little after, the bay would be dry.  We slowly began to work up the creek, watching and casting.  The fish were still hard to come by.  More than once, I commented to Reid that it just did not seem to be a good day for mullet fishing.  The fish were just not that abundant.  We kept at it.  We’d fished all afternoon, and we were not going to go home with just a handful of fish.  Finally, things began to improve just a bit as we moved on up the creek.  I got to where I was catching a mullet on nearly every other throw.  Reid was starting to do likewise.  As the sun dropped to the horizon, we probably had a total of fifteen in the cooler.  That’s hard fishing for a day’s catch.

A bit ahead of me in the channel, Reid volunteered to go further up and investigate some activity in water that was only inches deep.  It appeared that some fish up there might be stranded by the falling water.  I decided to wait with my kayak in the deeper water while he trudged through the muck.  He soon had a flounder laid on the hill and hollered for me to bring the kayak to get it.  He marked its location with the red visor that he’d worn all day to keep the sun off of his face.  He had another couple of mullet next to the flounder when I got there.  Further on, he went. 

By the time I loaded the flounder and other fish, he was much further up the creek, and he was now in the general location of what we had always known to be the “hole” in the creek bed.  Whenever we have previously fished this channel, there had always been plenty of water present to hide the features of the bottom.  We had always known that the hole was there, and it is a deep one.  But, even just a few inches of water is enough to disguise the hole from view.  Personally, I had always avoided that one little corner of the bay.  Now, on the extraordinarily low tide, the perimeter of the hole lay fully exposed.  We could see the entire hole, and its full extent.  It was big, and I had heard for years that it was deep!  And, by the time I got there, Reid was dredging mullet out of it on almost every cast.  He had a half dozen fish laying in the mud next to where I stopped pulling the kayak.  By now the water was so shallow that even the kayak balked at moving as the mire on the bottom slowed its progress.  I slogged through the mush to retrieve the fish he’d laid out and take them back to the cooler.

Reid declared that he wanted to move to the other side of the hole, toward the bank of the slough.  In the gloaming, I suggested that he should wait for me to finish packing away the caught fish. Then, I’d grab my net out of the kayak and stand near him as he crossed through the hole to the other side.  If, the hole was as deep as we suspected, and if the mire in the bottom would not allow him to swim, I could toss my net in to pull him out.  He agreed.  A minute or so later, with me standing next to him, he charged off into the watery mire toward the other side.  He promptly went down into the swirl over the top of his head, virtually disappearing.

I was ready to throw my net on him when in a huge surge of adrenaline and force, he bobbed up to the surface and charged through the muck up the other side, churning out of the hole and up the bank in one forceful movement.  There is never a dull moment when you chase Mr. Mullet.  He was soon pulling in two and three fish at a time on each cast from the opposite side of the hole.  These fish were stranded.  There was no escape.  With the exception of the hole, there was no water left in this part of the harbor.  By the time the carnage was over, fifteen minutes later, we had 35 fish in the box, a handful of which were flounder and one redfish.

The sun was long gone and it was going to be a long drag back to the sand launch.  I knew that most of the way back would be a walk, not a paddle.  It took both of us to drag my kayak back down the mud-exposed creek bottom, with a hundred pounds of fish in the cooler on the back of the ‘yak.  When we finally made it back down to the creek mouth, where his kayak was located, we rinsed the mud off the fish, and repacked them all with fresh ice, dividing them up between each kayak’s 48-quart coolers.  I emptied out the ice from the snack cooler over the fish and we started the tug of war with each kayak to get them out far enough into the bay to be able to paddle them rather than drag them.  There was barely an ankle’s worth of 

water left, and the tide was still going out.

We stopped a few minutes later, and I dried off my hands and took a digital camera out of my dry box to catch the last rays of sunlight that were left at the mouth of the Harbor.  I asked Reid to position himself between me and the dusky sky.  When I loaded the pictures to my laptop the next day, I was amazed at the quality of the colors and hues that the camera managed to capture in the low-level light.  And, the camera had also captured a half-a-dozen pictures of my six foot two inch teenager-turned-man in silhouette again the darkening horizon.  The day was spent, and so were we.  There was still a 30 minute pitch-black paddle back to the sand launch where the truck awaited.  The coolers were full of fish.  My heart was full of memories.

Heath Langston

There are two mullet fishing philosophies within the confines of the small town of Sopchoppy, FL.  And, they both emanate across the road from each other.  One is what I call the “Lawhon” method.  That’s where you gather up a gang of like-minded men and go to the harbor together and work as a team to harvest the mullet.  The other I call the “Porter” method.  The Porter method is pretty much every man for himself.  Get together any size group of men you want, but when we get down to the water, you go your way and I’ll go mine.  My formal training in mullet fishing came from the Lawhon side of the road.  

When the Lawhon gang goes mullet fishing, a group of anywhere from between three and twenty men and boys go down to the water’s edge, pile into impossibly small jon boats and ply the quarter of a mile distance to the far side of the harbor before bailing out into the knee-deep water to form lines of net blockades working up the channels and creeks.  It is very important to watch the tides and fish on the appropriate tide.  If the tide goes too low, the boats can get stranded in the shallows until the harbor re-floods a few hours later: a not so uncommon situation.  The water up here is sometimes painfully shallow, and the mud can be more than knee deep.

When the Porter crew goes, most likely a boat will not be necessary.  Most of the crew will wade out from the beach or shore into water that is mostly about waist deep, and await the fish coming by.  They will park their pickup trucks along the water’s edge on the nearby road or highway.  The water in the top end of the bay, where the Lawhon’s prefer to fish is murky and grey.  At the top of the bay, the fish almost never can be seen - even a few inches below the water’s surface.  Where the Porters usually fish, the problem can sometimes be just the opposite, and if the fish can see you, they will avoid you.  Where the Porters fish, the bottom of the bay is almost always firm and sandy, but the water is normally deeper, and requires a much heavier net – one that will travel to the bottom of the bay quickly once thrown in order to pin the fish before they have a chance to swim out from under it.

Rarely, to my knowledge, over the years, has one crew invited the other to fish together.  

So, when the call came one day from Bobby Porter to invite me to fish with them, I was eager to go.  On the phone, Bobby, said they were on their way to the harbor, asking if I’d like to join them.  I dropped what I was doing, drove straight to the house, threw my net in the truck, along with a cooler and some ice, and drove straight out to the harbor.  I checked with Bobby a couple of times via cell phone to make sure I knew where to find his crew once I got down to The Point.  He had several other men with him, including his son and grandsons and a couple of other men from Sopchoppy.  Each man had his own pickup truck, and as the crew moved around the area looking for the greatest concentration of fish, the group moved as a caravan.

I caught up with Bobby’s crew on the inside of the long sand spit that forms Alligator Harbor.  One side of the spit is the open Gulf of Mexico; the other is the shallow and highly productive beloved harbor about which I love to write.  On this side of the Harbor, long boat docks leave the shore and extend hundreds of feet out into the bay.  At the end of the docks are large wooden boat houses and mechanisms for raising boats completely out of the water.  Most are well maintained, and nearly all are decorated with no trespassing signs.  Mostly, we were blind-casting.  Blind casting is act of throwing a net into the water in front of you in hopes that there might be a fish somewhere underneath the net.

We fished in a number of different locations, and, for the most part, did pretty well.  As the lone representative of the Lawhon gang fishing with the Porters, I did respectably, catching a fair number of fish with my ultra-light custom net. By the end of the evening, we were all tired and ready to pack the fish in coolers and head in.

As we gathered up and said goodbye for the evening, I offered my fish to Bobby, and he mentioned for the first time, that our fishing effort was actually in support of a fish fry that was to be the following day at the home of a mutual friend whose son was on death’s doorstep.  This young man had been laid low fifteen to twenty years prior by an infection most commonly associated with mosquitos.  However, in his case, the sickness was brought about by an infection that his body was unable to conquer.  Having fought a good and brave battle, his body was now shutting down after all these years. It appeared that there was no way to stop that from happening. 

Bobby told me that I was welcome to come out to the cookout; it was to be at the home of our mutual friend.  He told me to bring my wife with me.  But, knowing the pain that the family was dealing with, with the eminent death of their son, I instead told Bobby that I just would not feel right, coming out to hang out and eat.  Instead, I offered to come to the event and DO something, like cook, or clean fish, or help with the other items that would be prepared with the meal.  He insisted that all of that was handled, and he just wanted me to come eat.  Again, I declined.  It just did not feel right.

The story is told that Heath Langston was about seventeen years old when he contracted meningoencephalomyelitis, which is a combined inflammation of the brain, spinal cord, and meninges.  The odds of getting a disease like this one are astronomically low, but that meant nothing for Heath. Heath was like a rock star in our county.  Everybody knew him, or knew of him.  Everybody knew at least some of the story of Heath’s illness.  He still made public appearances right up until the last year of his life.  His wasted body was wheelchair bound, and his skin looked like it was stretched tight over his bones.

Despite living in the county for a dozen years, I only met Heath for the first time just a few months prior to his passing.  There had been a change of command at the local sheriff’s office, and the new sheriff was a member of my church.  As such, our church sanctuary was used to hold the swearing-in ceremony.  It was a Wednesday evening, a night when I am normally found in church.  The building was packed with well-wishers and family members of the various sheriffs’ department dignitaries.  Heath was the son of Under Sheriff and former pastor of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church, Maurice Langston, and as such, was counted among those present to watch the proceedings.  At some point during the course of the evening, I noticed the lanky young man in a wheel chair near the dual back doors of the sanctuary.  He was gaunt looking; yet, it seemed that every person in the room was intent on shaking his hand and speaking to him.  That had to be Heath.

Maurice Langston had been my pastor for a number of years.  He and his wife, Judy, were extraordinarily faithful and devoted to their flock at Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church.  Occasionally, I would hear of Heath’s battles with his disease, and some of those stories were pretty horrifying.  There were stints in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals up in Tallahassee.  There were whispers of Heath doing worse, then doing better, then doing worse.  There was muted discussion of all of the harm that was being done to his body by the disease that ravaged him.  He was known to occasionally have to spend days on end in the hospital.  All the while, the Langston’s continued to serve their flock, and to smile warmly and hug and minister to the rest of us.

Rather than allow their own personal situation to dictate their outer demeanor, both Maurice and Judy always seemed to graciously accept their family’s misfortune.  Rather than allow their own troubles and problems to steal their joy and the focus, they instead relied on the guidance systems supplied by God and His Holy Scripture to navigate the terrible waters that no parent wants to sail.  I once heard Maurice deliver from the pulpit, within one of the myriad sermons that he preached, a pithy one-liner that I felt so appropriate from a man who carried burdens like his:  that there is a heartache on every pew in the building.  I felt, as soon as I heard him utter the words, that if there were a man on the planet who had the credibility to make that statement, it was Maurice Langston.  Maurice and Judy had long ago given their troubles and their son to the Creator of the Universe.  But, nevertheless, they were left with the problem of how to give each day to that same Creator.  Each new day brought new challenges in their fight to save their son.  Each new day brought new battles that they knew they’d eventually lose.  Each new day, the war became a bit more desperate and the outcome a bit more certain.  You see, it’s one thing to lose a child.  Losing a child is a terrible and horrific event.  It’s quite another to lose one a little bit more each day – to know that the ultimate end is defeat.

That ultimate end was close at hand when Bobby Porter offered the invitation to go mullet fishing with him.  Six months prior to that invitation, at the Sheriff’s swearing-in ceremony, there he was - meeting and greeting the hundreds of people present for the event from the seat of his wheelchair.  His mom stood proudly by.  I got in line to shake his hand and introduce myself.  When it was my turn, he gave me a broad smile and an iron-grip of a handshake.  He said that was good to meet me, and the look in his eye made me believe that he meant it.  People were lining up to speak to him; well-wishers crowded around.  When he shook my hand and looked me in the eye, I could tell that his dad had trained him well.  Us dads, we want our boys to be able to look another man in the eye and greet him in a polite, yet manly way.  Men who are strangers, extend the hand, grip the hand of the other, square our shoulders, and tell them that it’s a pleasure to meet them.  Successful dads know that their own sons will navigate through life in much better fashion, once having mastered this simple paradigm of manly etiquette.  Heath Langston had obviously been taught by the best.

Word was whispered around Sopchoppy that Heath was not doing well.  This time was different.  I knew not to ask questions.  Was it that he had gone through the last of line of defense for a certain type of anti-biotic?  I wasn’t going to ask.  Was it that the disease had taken some new, more dire and threatening turn? I wasn’t going to ask.  Perhaps a sympathetic and opportunistic co-disease had presented itself?  Not going to ask.  Bobby’s invitation to me to provide fish for the fish fry, and to attend, was incredibly kind of him.  And while I did not feel that attending the fish fry was appropriate, I was so wonderfully touched to have been a part of the crew that caught the fish that was used as fare.

That same weekend, Heath passed.  He went back to the Creator.  Remember, you heard it here, we don’t own our kids.  We only rent them.

…

Heath’s funeral was the following Tuesday.  Of course, it was held in the sanctuary of my church - the same sanctuary where I’d shaken for the first and last time, his frail, yet manly hand, just a few months before.

Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church is a large congregation nestled in a very small community in one of the most rural parts of Florida.  Southern Wakulla County is nearly an hour’s drive removed from the confines of the large metropolitan area of Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida.  Tallahassee, suave and sophisticated, with a very large state university, a smaller, but equally well-known university for minority students, and other institutions of all sorts that are known around the region, is a bustling area of nearly a half-million people.  But, down along the Forgotten Coast, where the land meets the marsh, eventually giving way to a thousand square miles of sea grass beds in the gentle northern Gulf of Mexico, life is fifty miles – and fifty years – removed.

Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church was birthed out of the upheaval brought about by a different church – one that I am very well familiar with.  I lived and worked for 20 years in the Brownsville area of Pensacola, FL, home to a large church called Brownsville Assembly of God.  My office was almost directly across Cervantes Street from Brownsville Assembly of God.  My next-door neighbor was the well-known Oscar’s Restaurant, one of the best mullet eateries on the Gulf Coast.  It was Oscar’s that gave this Kentucky boy his love of fried mullet.

My office secretary was a life-long member of Brownsville Assembly and she graciously offered numerous times to escort my family as Sunday morning visitors to the church.  I always politely declined her invitations, being a devoted member of one of the other big churches in Pensacola, Olive Baptist Church.  Through her, I had opportunity to meet the pastor of Brownsville AOG on several occasions.  When the beginnings of the well-known Brownsville Revival (or Brownsville Awakening) first began to rumble in the early to mid-90’s, that entire area of Brownsville, including the business community, was impacted.  I was made especially aware of the events across Cervantes Street because of my daily interaction with my secretary, Marilyn.  The Revival eventually came to the attention of the local daily newspaper (derisively referred to in Pensacola as The Mullet Wrapper), and then began its meteoric rise to national and global fame.

Apparently, not long before we moved to Wakulla County in 1999, Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church came about due to a split in the former First Baptist Church of Sopchoppy, when the church leadership of FBC Sopchoppy, having visited Brownsville AOG, decided to implement some of the doctrines taught at the Brownsville AOG revival in their hometown church, thereby upsetting the long-standing status quo.  Many a Baptist church has split down through the eons, and most were probably busted up for similar reasons.  The new churches became Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church and River of Life Church.

So when my family moved to Wakulla County in 1999, we could still feel the aftershocks reverberating from the big split in Sopchoppy.  We initially joined First Baptist Church of Crawfordville, but migrated to Sopchoppy Southern Baptist in 2003.  That means that we spent a total of three years under the wonderful pastoral ministry of Maurice Langston prior to moving to North Carolina for three years.  The outcome of the split in the years since it took place has resulted in two vibrant and growing congregations, both working hard to serve the spiritual needs of the citizens of Wakulla County.

Over the course of time, families will tend to feud and fuss, and then come together at the moment of a crisis.  That’s what happened in Wakulla County when Heath Langston passed.  The congregations and leadership of both churches collapsed together in and around and on top of the Langston family in a show of love and support.  The entire community personally felt Heath’s loss.  And, there we all were the day of the funeral, stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder into the sanctuary of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church.  My wife and I grabbed one of the few remaining seats left inside the sanctuary in the balcony, crowded against the right wall of the building.  It was otherwise standing room only.

Henry Jones, the current senior pastor of River of Life and former pastor of the now defunct First Baptist Church of Sopchoppy, and the current pastor of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church, Dr. Bill Jenkins, co-led the service, both delivering condolences and both delivering timely, thoughtful and prayerful sermons.  The hushed congregation listened intently to both men.  The mood in the building was not one of sorrow, but one of joy.  The entire community was together again, just as they had been before the split years ago.  You simply cannot hug that many necks in one day and not feel the love and support of the community – and the resultant joy that comes with it.  As I mentioned, a family might fuss, but we give a lot of neck hugs after it is all over.

From the pulpit, Henry Jones carefully recounted Heath’s final days to the crowd.  He also, carefully wove the story of Heath’s grand life and purposeful passing.  He pulled together the painful strings and threads of a life so severely impacted by disease, yet so touching of others.  He was able to weave a whole cloth from those strings and threads, and presented that cloth to all of us in the congregation during that sermon.  His humor and good nature caused us to at once laugh and cry.  We were unified as a community and the Spirit of God was glorified by the gifted speaking and leadership of both Jones and Jenkins.  As Jones closed his remarks, he mentioned that Maurice and Judy’s friends had come together the weekend before to host a fish fry in Heath’s honor.  And, with a flourish that only a really good preacher can make, Henry Jones capped his sermon with the humorous remark that “only in Wakulla County, will a young man like Heath Langston automatically desire that for his last meal, he wanted to eat the local delicacy, fried mullet”.

And, at that moment, seated in the balcony with my wife, with Henry Jones speaking those words, it completely came to me.  Forgetting the grave nature of the proceedings, I looked at her and loudly exclaimed with unabashed glee:  “HE ATE MY MULLET! --- HE ATE MY MULLET” !!   Angela grabbed my arm and told me to sit back down.   I left that building walking six inches off the ground.  I didn’t care if I’d embarrassed her or anybody else. 

I told her as we exited the service that I was going to find that Bobby Porter and thank him for the invitation to mullet fish with him that fateful afternoon.  It was, after all, the first time that Bobby had extended that invitation to me.  It was also, as far as I knew, one of the few times recently that the “outside the harbor” guys had reached across the road to us “inside the harbor” guys.  He was nowhere to be found.  So, after a bit of futile searching, I abandoned the plan to find him, and just figured that I’d catch him that next night at Wednesday evening services.  For reasons unknown, he was not to be found Wednesday evening.  So the next day I called him, and told him that I wanted to thank him for the invitation for that specific mullet fishing trip.  He acted like it was no big deal.  I told him that if I never went mullet fishing again for the rest of my life, it was OK.  He asked “what do you mean”?  I replied to him that the trip to catch fish for the Langstons and for Heath for that last fish fry for him … if I never went mullet fishing again, Bobby, you got me in on the one trip that - more than any other that I’ll ever go on - really mattered.

We only rent our kids.

The Last Mullet Fishing Trip of the Season - 2012

The Last Mullet Fishing Trip of 2012

The weather was perfect yesterday to squeeze in just one more mullet fishing trip prior to their annual departure from the Harbor when they will annually congregate with other mullet to form huge schools and move offshore for spawning.  The numbers of harbor mullet have been falling in the last few weeks as the early birds leave.  Actually, the pickins have become pretty slim, but, there were still a few left at the top end of the Harbor, and I was able to pull the trigger on a total of 16 nice big ones.

The key to yesterday's solo effort was timing.  I pushed away from the sand launch in my kayak while the Harbor was still flooded with tidal water.  The tops of the oysters bars could not be seen on the far side of the Harbor.  Normally, I launch a little later in the tidal cycle, but I wanted to have time to investigate a few out-of-the-way holes in areas of the bay that I rarely visit.  So, for once, I had the luxury of having sufficient time on my hands to poke around a little.  It's a 20-minute paddle over to the oysters bars.

Solo mullet fishing is art, not science.  When fishing with a group, the fishermen will generally form a human line of netters and force the mullet to come by their artificial gauntlet as the tide falls.  The line of fishermen slowly pushes up a creek or channel, and the mullet try to run by, employing any of a number of tactics to escape.  It's a brutish endeavor that is lopsidedly in favor of the humans.  Once a mullet is within reach of your cast, you or your teammate can generally get him.  The team approach is always best, because it is so much easier to trap the mullet and bully them into submission, than it is to outsmart them.  But, as it is with all things human, the logistics of finding enough men or boys to fill the tidal creeks, nets in hand, is difficult at best.  Team sports like baseball, t-ball, soccer and football seem to keep most youngsters and their young dads occupied.  Older boys and teens want to be in the woods hunting, when not in school.  For others, it's a situation of juggling work schedules.  Unfortunately, more often than not when the tides are right, the mullet fishing must wait!

Alas, because of all of the above, I've been doing a lot of solo mullet fishing lately.  Solo mullet fishing requires a different set of strategic tactics.  Without the benefit of additional human help, you have to rely on the attributes of the natural features in the harbor to pinch off the mullet as they attempt to move with the tides.  I'm not saying that you have to use more intellectual faculties than when fishing with others, because truth is, no matter what tactic you deploy, the act of subduing a harbor mullet is difficult regardless of the human configuration!  Herein is the reason why I often lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling thinking over strategies in my head.  I'll spend six months during the "off season" pondering the various features in the top end of the bay, and how those features might be used in my favor under certain conditions.  Do I use the kayak to block the creek, causing the fleeing mullet to pause sufficiently to allow me time to throw?  Shall I drape a spare net across the side of the kayak to increase the likelihood that they will pause at the artificial obstruction?  Will the water be sufficiently low in the creek to allow me to use human means to plug the path of escape, thus allowing me to investigate areas further upstream without risk of loosing fish on which my back is turned?  Are there any other alternate channels, perhaps of which I am not aware, leading out of this pinch point which will allow their escape?  How many times have I blocked a channel in the marsh only to find out that all of the mullet left by using a back door?  What frustration!  And if the tide is sufficiently high, they will simply swim out through the grass; forget about using the water in the channel to make their escape, they will flip and flop through the grass to get to a different channel to get away from you!

My first attempts this day were met with utter frustration.  I first tried a tactic that has worked well for me many times in the past:  stealth.   I quietly eased up on a hole in the marsh grass - one that has produced fish over time, and, using the wind at my back, launched my net in a high arch over the berm of grass separating me from the hole.  My hope was that unsuspecting mullet, not knowing I was on the other side of the strip of grass island, would not have fled my presence.  The hole was empty with the exception of a lone big boy who was lounging to my right.  He made a big protest and quickly left.  I retrieved the empty net thinking that as late in the season as it was, it could be pretty hard to find targets today.  Several more holes with the same tactic produced the same results.

Second strategy:  block the channel.  I moved into an area that we have nicknamed “George Straight”.  It's a series of canals and pinch points that eventually lead back to the larger channels via four different outlets.  Therefore, to effectively fish George Straight, you need a minimum of four fishermen.  I am aware, however, of certain sub-features within George Straight, where perhaps I could park the kayak and block a small channel, thus allowing me to trap an unwary fish.  This is truly the uppermost part of the estuary.  In this area, the marsh is shot-through with sinuous little channels and creeks.  The floor of the bay in this area is very soft and difficult to walk through.  With the tidal water still fairly high, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of fish in George Straight.  But, despite repeated casts, was unable to secure even one.  They all got by me ... down to the last fish.

Third strategy:  block the hole.  I know of at least three features in the marsh - there are probably plenty more - where there is only one way in ... and one way out.  And, the opening to the larger channel is very, very tight.  While mullet will not congregate in these holes in great numbers, I have caught ten to fifteen fish in these little specialty spots in the space of thirty minutes if I can sufficiently block the entrance / exit.  In times past, I have even had fish launch themselves out of the water, over the kayak, and back into the water on the other side, in their effort to escape!  Finally, I was able to catch one fish in one of these little holes, who, quite unfortunately for himself, deployed none of the aforementioned tactics.  One in the box.

As the day wore on, I decided to move to the back of the bay to a spot that has produced a lot of fish for me in the late season.  This new tactic would deploy a number of items in the arsenal:  The wind and sun would be at my back, and the tide would rolling out and I would be standing in a little pinch point that would require the fish to move within the reach of my net.  So I paddled over to a man-made portion of the bay about which I have written in the past.  It's a half-mile long canal that was dug some 50 years ago to allow property owners to have boat access to the bay.  There, I was able to park the kayak, and haul myself out on a muddy sand bank at water's edge and wait and watch for the telltale signs of a fish moving by on his way out of the canal with the tide receding.  From the perspective of the fish, I was blending with some of the wild salt tolerant foliage growing on the bank.  Also from the perspective of the fish, the sun was behind me, thereby blinding the fish just a bit from being able to see me.  Also, I made sure that my shadow created by the lowering sun did not fall across the water; certain to alert the fish that was something amiss.  I was hoping that even with a majority of the fish now set to leave the harbor for the season, there still might be enough left to fill the cooler on the back of the kayak, which I have dubbed the "mullet morgue".

I left the kayak tied to the sand bank around the corner of the mucky spit.  This effectively put the kayak out of view.  Sometimes, I'll use the kayak to intimidate the fish, causing them to pause, but other times I don't want them to think there is anything unusual going on in their fishy little paradise.  I positioned myself among the low-growing shrubbery that somehow manages to make a living in this tough, salt-laden environment.  And, with the breeze and sun at my back, I waited.  I could see fish coming down the channel some 100 feet away.  Would they come all the way down the slough and exit the channel on the falling tide like I had hoped? Or, would they stop and play?  Were they interested in moving out?  Or were they just conducting their mullet business as usual?  Finally, from a fish's wake (the movement on the top of the water) I could tell that a fish was purposefully moving in my direction.  Would I be ready?  Would my net open?  Would I time the cast to coincide with the location of the moving fish?  It's an 8-foot net, plenty big for a wide cast, but with water this clear, will the fish see the net coming and dart away before it hits the water?  Here is where the hunter either succeeds or fails.  There will be food on the table or there will not be ... I launch the net ... SUCCESS!  I can feel the net twitching as I pull it to shore.  A good-sized fish is inside thrashing about in his attempt to escape.

With the channel still full of water, I think to myself that there might be dozens of opportunities at this little spot.  I had never deployed this tactic in this location at this time of the day with the wind and weather being what it was; which is to say that no two mullet fishing trips are ever the same. The wind, weather, location of the sun and tidal cycle all play a role in a successful strategy.  Eventually fourteen more fish succumbed to this tactic. And for every fish I caught, five more got by me.  And for every fish I saw, probably twice that many swam by with no alerting of their presence whatsoever.  The harbor, it turns out, was still full of fish, despite the date on the calendar.  

With the 48-quart cooler on the back of my kayak now full of fish and ice.  And with the satisfaction of knowing that on yet one more day, I’m the boss of the harbor, I settle into the seat of the kayak and take the paddle in my hand.  It will be a 25 minute paddle back to the boat launch on the other side.  Both of my shoulders are complaining to me (the results of surgeries and golf injuries from years gone by).  I am not really all that covered with black harbor mud, but you can bet that I’ve got mud stuck into places where it will be difficult to get soap when I get home to shower.  The afternoon – and the mullet fishing season for 2012 – is long spent and the sun is hanging just above the horizon. Life is good.  This will be my last kayak trip to the harbor for the season. It is time for the fish to move offshore to spawn in vast schools.  Any mullet yet harvested this year will be caught at the mouth of the Bays as they move with the tides on the outside of the harbor.  All of the harbor mullet will be gone until spring.

But, I'll be back then, Mr. Mullet.  And we'll match wits once more ... enjoy your off season, Mr. Mullet.  Enjoy your seasonal foray in the briny deep of the off-shore waters as you mate and discharge your roe; thereby creating yet another generation of tasty mullet fillets.  But, let's agree to do this again come April.  And then, we’ll do it again … and again … and again.

You Only Rent Your Kids

The Top Secret Mullet Files

I love a good mullet fishing story. Like the one I overheard the youth pastor at my church telling about how he was fishing off the dock in back of his house on the Ochlocknee River with his very young son when it happened that he had thrown his mullet net several times off of one side of the dock – producing nothing. The little boy insisted that the dad try the other side, just like Jesus told his disciples in John 21:6. Apparently, the youngster had been paying attention in Sunday School class. And, per the little boy’s faithful expectations, the dad pulled in the net with a load of wiggling mullet on the first cast. The net was full of more mullet than my youth pastor and his family could eat in one sitting.

And, there are many stories that come to mind of when a mullet fishing expedition produced not just a good catch of fish, but also a brand new friend. Such was the day a few years ago, when, with my own son, I was launching from the sand ramp to head out to the top end of the Harbor for a mullet harvest. As we got set to push off, another vehicle came backing down the ramp with a small skiff behind. The vehicle, driven by a woman, was having a bit of trouble getting boat properly positioned. A man got out of the far side of the vehicle and began pushing the boat off of the trailer, with some difficulty. I suggested to my teen-aged son that he should walk over and introduce himself, and offer to assist while I retrieved one more item from my own vehicle. Soon, my son was pushing on the bow of the boat with the man and the boat bobbed freely off the trailer.

The gentleman, probably a few years older than myself, asked where we were headed to fish, and after introducing myself, I motioned that we were headed to the oyster bars a quarter of a mile off on the other side of the harbor, for an afternoon of mullet fishing. “MULLET FISHING!” he proclaimed with excitement! You guys know where to catch mullet out here? I told him that we certainly did, and as the woman in the vehicle drove off with the trailer, he explained that he was headed to a beach house a few miles away at the mouth of the harbor to dock his boat. He was from Tallahassee and his family had owned the beach house for many years. He did not get a chance to get down to the house very often, but being that a holiday weekend was coming, he and his wife were expecting a few people at the house, and he thought it would be nice to have the boat handy.

I told him that he was welcome to come along with us and we’d show him where we fish, and, he was welcome to fish with us. He was astonished at the invitation, and gave some sort of explanation that tied together several threads of thought like – “Normal Wakulla red-necks don’t ever want to show an outsider from Tallahassee where the good mullet fishing holes are located – AND – the locals don’t even want to speak to guys like me.” I promptly dismissed both notions, telling him I didn’t know any of those guys. Further, the men who, years ago, had insisted that me and my then 6-year-old son tag along with them so they could teach us their techniques and locations, were the same men who’d had the most positive impact on my own life since becoming and adult, many years ago. Curiously, he continued to act as though I had just stuffed a $100.00 bill down his shirt pocket.

He called his wife and told her that he’d be down at the back of the house a bit later, and then got ready to follow us across the harbor. I suggested that he take off the crocs he was wearing and put on a pair of tennis shoes, and when he told me that he only had the crocs to wear, I suggested that he might want to stay inside his boat and throw his net from the gunnel, rather than risk cutting his feet or ankles on the numerous oyster reefs that are sometimes exposed in that part of the bay, and sometimes not. He insisted that he would be fine with the crocs. I politely insisted that I did not agree, but, he was welcome to come along anyway. He was so excited to be with us that it seemed to me that he would have gone barefooted, if necessary. I think I even went so far as to remind him that oysters create particularly nasty cuts that take a very long time to heal. There was no stopping him.

When we arrived at our destination, I gave Terry (not his real name) a quick tutorial on the game plan. The tide was falling rapidly, and we’d have to position ourselves quickly in certain areas of the upper harbor to block the creeks and take advantage of the falling water to net the fish as they tried to come by. The first feature that we stopped at was a bar that we have christened “The Crescent” because it is shaped like a large crescent moon. The Crescent has a feature on its back side that funnels the fish out one side with only the skinniest of outlets on the top end. It is possible to block the top end with the proper positioning of a boat and walk up the funnel while casting nets at fish that are desperately trying to come out of the feature with the tide. I asked Terry to stay with his own boat, using it to block the top end of the funnel, and me and my teen-aged son would walk up the funnel. I predicted to Terry that he would see fish trying to come out of the top end, and that if he kept it blocked properly, he would be able to throw on the fish – just like shooting ‘em in a barrel.

No sooner had Reid and I started to walk up the funnel, when I noticed that Terry had jumped out of his own boat, crocs and all, and was knee deep in the middle of the small outlet. He suddenly started hollering something that I could not discern. My son told me that from what he could hear, he thought Terry had hurt himself. The next thing I knew, Terry had climbed back up the side of his skiff and was pulling his crocs off. By the time we got to the top of the funnel a few minutes later, nearby where he had positioned his boat, it was easy to see that he was bleeding from both feet and ankles - profusely. He had really done a number on himself. Blood was everywhere.

Terry’s fishing trip was over, and I suggested that he might want to consider a trip to the emergency room. He insisted that he was fine, and that he would go ahead down the harbor and dock behind his beach house, and let his wife tend to him. We swapped cell phone numbers, and I told him that he was always welcome to come back out with us at any point in the future when he wanted. Secretly, I was pretty sure he’d bring along a pair of tennis shoes for the next trip. We all three shook hands good-bye, and then my son and I turned back to the business at hand – slaying the beastly Mr. Mullet. Terry grimaced and pointed his boat toward the mouth of the harbor. It would take him fifteen or twenty minutes to get there. I was hoping he would not bleed out first.

Once the cooler on our boat was full, we headed back to the launch. On the way home, I called Terry’s cell phone, and it was answered by a woman. I asked to speak to Terry, and the woman asked “may I say who’s calling?”. I told her to tell him that it was his “mullet fishing buddy”. He was laughing as he picked up the phone and assured me that he was going to be fine. He mentioned that he’d made a note to be sure and listen carefully on future mullet fishing trips with me to any advice or directive that I was giving. He assured me that he was in good hands, and we agreed to put together a future expedition as soon as he was healed.

I did not find out until much MUCH later in my future mullet fishing friendship with this man, that not too many years hence, he had lost his own son – his hunting and fishing buddy – to a sudden catastrophic heart failure when the young man was in his mid-20’s. The loss was completely unexpected, and totally without explanation. I found out after many future fishing trips, that Terry had been grieving the loss for many years. And, until he met us at the sand launch that fateful afternoon, he had not so much as touched his mullet net – the same one that his deceased son had used for years – and had instead only looked at it laying in the storage compartment of the boat – each time thinking of his son ----- that is, until he met the Tilley boys.

Terry was pretty impressed that a couple of Wakulla boys, namely me and my son Reid, would pull him in to the Top Secret world of in-harbor mullet fishing.  Actually, he was more than impressed – he was stunned.  But my own mullet fishing philosophy has always been “inclusive” rather than “exclusive”.  I was taught “The-More-The-Merrier” method by my mullet fishing professors.  Besides, the fishing is great, and it only gets better each year.  The Harbor is full of mullet.  Sometimes, it seems you can walk across the water on them, and never even get your shoes wet.  There is plenty for everybody.  In my not-so-humble opinion, the mullet fishery is one of Florida’s greatest and least-known resources.

I want to go ahead and tell you right now, before I get any further into this story, that it’s my strong belief that we, as moms and dads, only rent our kids.  We don’t own them.  We never did.  We were given charge of them, that’s all.  And one day out in the distant - or maybe not-so-distant future - they have to be given back.  You might think you own your kids.  You might think you made them, that you were given charge of them, and that you control their destinies.  That’s all human illusion.  You don’t and you never did.

Maybe, if you are like me and my wife, you might still be around when the giving back process takes place.  That’s right, we belong to a club that I like to say no parent should ever become a member of.  That’s the club of having to put together the funeral of one of your own children.  Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who have membership in that club.  Most don’t go around talking about it.   When you are a member of the club, you make mental note of people you run across in the community who are fellow members.  You don’t hand them a membership card, but you make a note of them in your mind.  You lay down a mental marker.  And, you silently wonder how they processed their loss.  You are constantly holding up your own painful emotions as a backdrop for others – comparing how you coped to how you perceive the other person probably coped.  As I said, there are more people that belong to the club than any of us would have otherwise guessed.  My brand-new mullet fishing pal Terry was a member.

When my now 17-year-old son was late back from a hog hunting trip out into the middle of the Ochlocknee swamp last spring, I had to remind myself of my philosophy of “only renting your kids”.  Although I am not a hog hunter, I am well aware of the dangers and risks involved.  And, unfortunately, there is no cell phone service that far out.  So, listing them in order of importance, you have the danger posed by the wild hog or hogs.  Then, you have the dangers that can exist in the forest itself, from rattlesnakes to bears to simply getting lost.  Don’t forget that there are swamps and creeks to ford, not to mention a river that the boys have been known to swim across to get to prime hog hunting areas.  There’s the weather, and there are weapons for dispatching the hogs and weapons for protecting yourself from a particularly vicious hog.   The list goes on and on.  You can probably appreciate my concern when the boys were a bit late checking in.

Despite my apprehension, I had to recognize two things about raising a teenaged son in the Deep South:  if you don’t trust him to take care of himself in the Big Woods of Life, don’t turn him loose to participate.  Instead, make him stay home and play video games.  Two, he’s not yours to keep – he never was, and he never will be.  He’s given his heart and life to Jesus, he did that as a child when he walked the aisle of a Baptist church in North Carolina.  He belongs to the Creator of the Universe and nobody else – even though his momma and girlfriend might argue otherwise!

So, when the story of Terry’s loss came to my attention over time, it was particularly poignant for me.  No story of such personal loss should be anything less than incredibly poignant, but this story really touched me.  Over the months that our relationship unfolded, I learned that Terry and his wife had twins boys.  The child they lost died of congestive heart failure.  He had been the one that must have been just like my own son:  an outdoorsman.  He was a young man who either had to be in the water, or on the water or in the woods.  If he was like my own son, he was constantly delivering catfish or bass or mullet or redfish or grouper to the dinner table.  Did I mention bream, redbellies and warmouth?  Speckled perch?  Seatrout?  Spanish Mackerel?  Sheepshead?  I’m sure you get the picture.  Depending on the season, he would have been calling a turkey, or turning out a pack of dogs on a deer trail, or setting up a stand and feeder.  As mentioned, my own son is also an avid hog hunter.  It’s always a treat to have him out on the water mullet fishing with me, because he getting so independent with his other pursuits, that I rarely see him, otherwise.

When a child is lost, the hole it leaves in in your life indescribably big. When that event took place in my own life, the only counseling that I received that seemed at all to help was from my father, who has since gone to be with The Lord.  That advice was the simple proposition that there are some points in our lives where we simply have to focus on just putting one foot in front of the other.  In other words, he was telling me that I had to figure out a way to somehow get my life moving again.  That process could only start with small steps.  But, the journey had to start, and the only person who could make that happen was me.  Other than those few words, there was no amount of consoling or kindness by others that could take away the sting of the loss of my daughter.  It’s been now many years since her loss.  Even the passage of time is not much of a help.  On the other hand, the rock-solid knowledge that I have that I will get to spend an eternity around God’s throne with her and the rest of my family is incredibly comforting.

It was important for me to listen to Terry and encourage him.  He had already transited most – if not all – of the drawn out grieving process.  But, that mullet net still represented one big obstacle.  His son had used it a lot, Terry, not so much.   His son had been in his mid-twenties when a congenital heart defect suddenly felled him.  He had been in life’s prime.  The promise of the future was huge, and you can bet that his dad was as proud of him as any dad could be.  The mullet net that been so used by the young man during his youth represented a very big connection to his son for Terry.  Embodied in that net were the memories of his son doing the things that he loved to do.  It was a big connection back to that period of time.

I went out of my way to stay in touch with Terry and make sure that he had every opportunity possible to fish with me.  I was always sending a text or making a phone call.  I was lending him nets and coaching him on where to buy new nets.  We fished together many times over the next couple of years, and he caught more than his share of fish.  He’d call me to let me know that he enjoyed the last trip, or that he was the king of the fish fry for showing up with a cooler full of fresh mullet.  I always enjoyed his company and was pleased that my simple invitation that day at the boat ramp to have my own son assist with the launch of his skiff, allowed me to get to know him. Was my invitation to mullet fish the last part of that process to help him “put one foot in front of the other”?  I’d like to think so.

It took some time, but Terry eventually shared with me how he had struggled over the years to bounce back and to cope with the loss of his son.  He once told me the story of how he could not bring himself to pick up the mullet net that his son had used over the years.  He could not bring himself to use it.  He could not bear the thought of holding the same net with which his son had had such carefree fun.  I was able to share with him my own experiences of the loss of a child – something that I had vowed privately years before to never speak of.  It was such a decades-long load off my chest to converse with another man who’d had a similar experience.  I ruefully call it “The Club No Parent Should Belong To”.

When Terry got the chance to be shown around the Harbor and taught the techniques that we use to trap and catch mullet, he jumped right in – literally.  In fact, on that first trip, he jumped in with crocs on his feet and cut himself to pieces on the oysters hiding in the murky water below.  It took him all summer to heal up.  But the next season, he was fit and ready.  We put together several highly successful kayak mullet fishing trips around the Harbor that same summer.  But the trip that stands out in my memory was the last one of the season.

I don’t mullet fish during the cold weather months.  The reason: I like to get into the water and chase those scaly critters.  And, when the water starts to get cold, most of the fun of the sport seems to depart.  Then, once the fall wears on, the mullet leave the inshore areas in our part of the Gulf of Mexico for the offshore briny deep where they spawn.  They school up in truly astonishing masses prior to leaving.  The Harbor is nothing more than a flat piece of water from late Fall until April.  No more fish jumping by the thousands.  I’ll occasionally drive out to the Harbor in the middle of winter, just to stand on the shore and imagine what it will look like once the warm weather returns.  Even on a warm, sunlit day, the Harbor seems forlorn and lonely at that time of the year.  A good friend once referred to the hunting and fishing calendar as “The Redneck Circle of Life”.  He went on to explain that “you fish during the warm, and you hunt during the cold”. That pretty much sums it all up.

As I recall, it was a warm day, but way past the first of November.  The air temperatures were comfortable, but the water had cooled considerably.  A couple of cold fronts had likely already come through.  I had warned Terry that there might not be any fish left in the Harbor by this time.  They were already schooling and leaving for the year.  He insisted that we try.  So, I met him at the launch with the kayaks, coolers and plenty of ice.  The tide was going to favor us that day, and we’d have plenty of time to work the falling tide and catch a nice mess of fish.  As mentioned, the water was unexpectedly chilly.  I would have likened it to be something on the order of Wakulla Springs’ temperatures – probably a shade less than 70°f.  I never thought twice about it because the air was warm and the sun was shining – and besides, there were mullet to catch!

The fish cooperated pretty nicely, and I am sure that we rounded up the last of stragglers that were left in the Harbor.  As the day wore on, we both had filled the coolers on the backs of the kayaks.  I had been so busy with my own fishing that had not noticed that Terry, positioned on an oyster bar a couple of hundred yards away, was standing slumped over and still.   He was not casting, just standing.  I packed up my net and paddled over to him, ready to suggest that the day was long spent and it was time to head in.  When my boat approached the bar, I could see that he was trembling and his lips were blue.  When I asked if he was ready to go, he eagerly indicated that he was.  As we paddled our two kayaks toward the launch, I kept a concerned eye on him.  The cold had apparently snuck up on him.  Me, on the other hand, with all my insulation, I never noticed it.  Terry, on the other hand, sports little extra bulk around his mid-section.

Fortunately, we made it to the launch without a problem, and I promptly loaded Terry’s cooler and belongings in his truck, and sent him on his way.  He had dried off and wrapped himself up before heading out.  I then loaded the kayaks on my truck and headed home myself.  It had been a good day.  It was what I also knew to be that last trip of that season.  I would not see Terry again for months.  Our paths never cross except over the opportunity of catching mullet together.

The following season, when we were once more out on the water together, Terry told me the rest of the story about that trip.  He told me that once the heater sufficiently warmed up in his truck, he rode with it full blast all the way home to Tallahassee, and was still shaking like a leaf once he got there more than an hour later.  He said he went straight from the truck to the hottest tub bath he’d taken in years.  And, after a good scalding in the tub, he went straight to bed under a pile of blankets.  We both had to laugh, and I reminded him that he needs to sport a bit more girth to provide insulation for such trips!

But on a more serious note, let this cautionary tale forewarn any of you who might want to chase down mullet – especially in the cool-weather months of the calendar.  This story should once more prove what we already know about Mr. Mullet:  he’s a very dangerous adversary.  He’d probably kill ya if he was given half a chance.  But, as long as I’m around, he’ll never get that opportunity.  As I was able to point out to one of the younger fishermen who accompanied me one day out on the water, the reason why mullet are so smart is because they swim in schools.  Just call me “Professor Tilley”!

The best $500.00 I ever spent was for a used sit-on-top kayak fishing kayak.  I had purchased a nice, top-of-the-line kayak for my teen aged son the previous season.  He was having lots of fun with it chasing fish all over the shallowest portion of local bays and creeks.  I decided that I’d try to the same, but my aim was to be the rascally, elusive, frustrating striped mullet.  Thus began my quest of solo kayak mullet fishing.

On a recent afternoon, I felt the call of the mullet. The weather was a bit questionable, but aside from some light rain, there appeared to be no storms in the area, so I drove out to the Sun and Sand launch and paddled my red kayak to the far side of the harbor on flat water. The tide was dead low at .2. That depth leaves enough water to float a kayak in the shallowest portions of the bay, but not by much. I exited the kayak once arriving at the channel that I’d planned to fish, and tethered it by rope to the belt on my swimsuit. The light breeze kept the boat bobbing at the end of the tether some 25 feet in back of me; allowing me the required clearance to throw the net without any entanglement with the boat.

Near the center of the channel, the water was a little less than knee deep, and the bottom was fairly firm. The first surface boil of a mullet coming by happened almost immediately, and calculating the speed of the timing of the two boils that had broken the water, I launched my net beyond where I thought the third boil might break. The guess turned out to be correct. I love it when this happens: first cast of the day and success in pulling the trigger on a mullet that thought it was the smartest creature in the bay. In the murky water of the harbor, apparently the mullet can see you, even though you can’t see them. This ol’ boy knew I was there.  I was in his backyard.  Mullet will use all their fishy faculties to try to sneak, slip, or charge by you.

After pulling the net in, I reached for the kayak’s tether rope and yanked it. The kayak glided gracefully up to my side, and setting the net with my prize in the seat of the kayak, I extricated my subdued fishy quarry, slipped my fingers into its gills, and then reached behind the kayak seat to open the lid of a forty-eight quart cooler, setting the mullet inside on the layer of awaiting ice laying on the bottom. One…. nine more to go. I had decided ahead of time to catch ten fish on this trip in preparation for the weekend. It was a nice, big harbor mullet. In my estimation, probably a three-year old fish. Not as big as they get, but plenty big and much bigger than the fish that congregate on the exterior of the harbor, coming in and out of Ochlocknee Bay with the tides. Harbor mullet tend to stay in the harbor, rather than run in and out with the tides. By doing so, they gain more weight and can be several times bigger than the mullet that are caught for the dinner plate by commercial fishermen. 

My fishing platform of choice is a fourteen foot sit-on-top with multiple compartments and plenty of space behind the seat for the required coolers.  I fit my ride with a 48-quart cooler for the harvested fish, and a 20-quart cooler for lunch, drinks, snacks and spare ice.  At the front of the boat is a sealed compartment that will hold at least two cast nets, anchor, drybox, life jacket and the required coast guard whistle.  This beast even has compartments that I don’t use.  It’s roomy and still quite maneuverable.  It will ride in the bed of my pickup truck with minimal trouble.  And, most importantly, it will float in about three inches of water.

Fish number two was waiting around the bend. With tide going as low as a .2, most of the fish had moved out of the shallow channels and will wait there for the incoming tide.  The sand flats in front of the oyster bars are expansive and featureless. They are square mile after square mile of nothing but firm sandy bottom.  It seems the fish know that the tide is going low.  But, they probably do no know just how low it will ultimately go.  So, the majority of the mullet move out of the upper reaches of the harbor, and wait in the bay for the tide to turn.  I am targeting those who are either too lazy to move out, or not smart enough to get of the way of a determined mullet fisherman who is bent on trapping them in the shallows.  The smarter mullet know their business.  They move right on out with the water.

Because of the shallowness, there were not many fish in the channel at my disposal as I worked slowly up the creek.  I am always cautious when on the water, but when fishing by myself, even more so.  I deliberately move my feet slowly in a shuffle along the bottom, giving ample time for resident stingrays to sense my presence and move on.  It would be tough to be hit by a sting ray this far away from the boat landing while fishing alone.  

Once, while mullet fishing with my son, I was stung while carelessly handling my net without properly inspecting it upon retrieval.   I had dragged it back after a cast, and did not notice a small juvenile ray caught helplessly inside.  As I started the process of reloading, his long tail whipped about and caught me with his stinger behind my right knee.  I still sport an ugly little scar as a reminder of the incident.  The pain was worse than that of a hornet or yellow jacket.  Having never been hit by a ray before, I felt it best to call it a day after that incident, and head back to the launch.  Fortunately, aside from the memorable pain, I felt no side effects otherwise.  A ray wants nothing more than to get away from you. You just need to let them know you’re there.  It’s the feet-shuffling that sets off their alarms.  I am a big advocate, these days, of completely inspecting your net after retrieval.  On a day like this one, I’m also watching the skies because there is rain all around the area – but no thunder.  Lightning is a show-stopper. I am the tallest thing out here for square mile after square mile.

So, even though there was a dearth of fish, the conditions were in my favor:  shallow water, overcast skies, and a slight ripple caused by the breeze.  I felt like an African bushman, hunting his next meal as he stalks through the savannah underbrush; constantly checking the wind and listening for the slightest rustle in the undergrowth ahead. One hundred yards further up, the channel turns to the right and enters a man-made canal that was apparently dug out by dragline in the 1950’s. Those where the bad old days when a businessman or real estate developer could bring a piece or two of heavy equipment to a wetland and sculpt it to his own specifications. Of course, that cannot be done any more – not unless you are the mayor of New Orleans. Fifty years ago, somebody dug out a half-mile long channel up against the bank of the inside of the Alligator Harbor sand spit so the owners of the lots in that area could have access to the deeper water of the harbor, thus allowing them to have boat docks, and presumably increasing the value of their properties. The tidal action of the bay has slowly silted in the channel so that now, not much more than a jon boat can navigate the channel. The docks that hang out over the slough are in disrepair and look forlorn and useless. Several even look like they’d be dangerous to stand on.

But mullet love this little corner of the harbor. Access to the canal is through a tee where the man-made portion starts. So, my plan is to walk up the natural channel, then turn to the right and walk to the tee.  I’ll be forced from there to either go left or right. The only problem with the majority of this man-made canal is that it cannot be waded. It’s simply too full of leg-grabbing goo.  At the front portion, where the tee is located, the bottom is firm and sandy. But, wade 20 yards down the middle either to the left or to the right, and you will suddenly find yourself in an all-enveloping, chest deep quagmire.  It’s not that the gooey soup wants to suck you under or hold you in place, it’s just that the loose muck is all around you and feels so claustrophobic. It’s one thing to be up to your thighs in the thick mud out in the harbor proper, it’s quite another to be swimming in a goo in one of these backwaters where you cannot feel or touch the bottom. So, needless to say, I stay out of the channel and hang to the sides where the bottom is firm, but slippery.  The unintended consequence of the man-made channeling of this slough is a legacy of god-forsaken mire that is slowly filling up the channel.  It truly feels unnatural.

Besides being known to eat plant material, mullet, also eat the detritus and tiny organisms that thrive in the muck on the bottom of the bay. They are scavengers and opportunists – not unlike a host of other sea creatures. Even on the lowest of low tides, there will be some mullet lunkers that never leave this man-made channel. And, the channel is almost narrow enough to throw a cast net from one side to the other. So, parking the kayak nearby, I slowly work along the bank, now out the water completely, walking through the inches-deep exposed mud, careful not to slide from the channel’s edge into the water, where certain neck-deep mire awaits an unsuspecting mullet fisherman. I prefer to walk the side of the channel that is opposite of the docks. This way there are no impediments to my stalk. On the other side, one must either crawl under the docks, when walking along, must walk up the bank and over the dock (technically trespassing), or walk through the channel below the dock, in the water where the neck deep mire awaits. God help the unsuspecting Atlanta tourist who might have rented a house for the weekend, thrown a big drunken party, and then had some 20-something drunkard think that he/she would take a mid-night dip off the end of the dock in back of the house. In the ooze, their tourist body would likely never be found.

An unsuspecting mullet - that is, one that has no idea that he is being stalked by the Florida equivalent of an African bushman - will often laze near the surface in a backwater area like this. In doing so, when the top of the water is flat, when he starts moving he will make a very large wake, alerting a predator like me to his presence. A large fish makes a very big wake. There are lots and lots of very big wakes as I scan with squinted eye down the channel. Walking is difficult, so I take it nice and slow. Fish number two of the day boils just to my right. I’ve spooked him. I break the silence of the moment when my net hits the water with a loud kersplash! Now, the entire mullet community knows that I’m nearby. Collectively, they convulse, twitch, and jerk.  And, the water in the slough comes alive with fish breaking the top of the water. While they are not present in the thousands, there are likely hundreds of fish lining this man-made portion of the bay. I retrieve my net, and cast number two has produced fish number two. I walk back to the kayak, and deposit Mr. Mullet ever so tenderly in the cooler along side his still comrade. I scoot some of the ice up over them, burying them in the icy chamber that will be their home for a bit longer. I chuckle to myself with sick humor, thinking of the forty-eight quart cooler on the back of my kayak as an icy coffin for my subdued opponent.

Repeat … and repeat … what fun! Finally, I decide that I can’t stop with just ten fish. I am too far away from the boat launch to quit now.  I will just give away my surplus. People in my neck of the woods are always willing to take free mullet!

The final cast comes forty-five minutes later. The tide has turned and I can tell that water is beginning its slow march back into the upper reaches of the bay. The cooler has at least twenty fish inside. I’ve taken a break for a quick lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (a mullet-man’s standard fare). The weather is holding with only an occasional drop of rain. I fished for less than an hour and a half. Now, it is time to pack up the kayak and head back in.  I ease around to the mouth of the tee, thinking that fish might be returning into the bay’s upper reaches now that the tide has turned. Very quietly, leaving the kayak 10 yards in back of me, I stand on the edge of the channel, partially shielded from view by tall marsh grass, and peer through the grass at the water beyond looking for a disturbance that would signal the presence of a fish. Within a few seconds, the water moves within reach of my cast. Upon retrieval, the net comes alive with thrashing fish. There are five mullet.

More than satisfied with the day’s effort, I pack the fish in the mullet-morgue and settle into the kayak for the trip back to the launch. When the kayak exits the tee, and I get back into the natural channel, the water is less than 12 inches deep. The channel is alive with fish. They are everywhere. They boil, and jump and slap their tails in disgust at my presence. But, they seem to know that I’m no danger to them while in my kayak without a net in my hand. They wait until the boat is literally on top of them before launching their fishy protest. They want me out of their bay. They want me gone. On another day, I’ll catch you, Mr. Mullet. And, after I catch you, I’ll filet you and batter you, and drop you in a bucket of hot oil.  My buddies will slap me on the back a while later and tell me what a great guy I am as we settle in to a meal of fresh-cooked mullet, doughboys, and slaw and cheese grits.  I am the hunter, Mr. Mullet, you are the prey.