Bad weather? Rough seas? No problem for Florida fishermen looking for their money catch

When low pressure followed by a strong cold front crossed Florida with tropical-storm-like conditions this past week, you would think boat ramps would be completely empty.

No one is crazy enough to head out when seas are calling for 6 to 10 feet, are they?

But for generations of local families, these conditions are what is needed to start money rolling in as they head out to fill boats with one of the most commonly seen Florida fish.

“Two of my buddies had two boatloads a day during this past front,” says angler Trever Flathman, who is a full-time commercial fisherman. A boatload could be 3,000 to 6,000 pounds depending on the size of the boat.

“But it’s been a pretty slow season so far. The price has been lackluster and there was only one huge front that was so bad we weren’t able to capitalize on it,” Flathman said.

What Flathman and others are looking for this time of year are roe mullet. Usually after Thanksgiving, mullet head offshore in giant schools to spawn.

Bigger mullet full of eggs are known for their red roe, while smaller fish usually have white roe. Red roe prices fluctuate yearly, with a price of around $1 a pound (whole fish) this year and white roe being between 10 cents and 20 cents a pound. What is sought after is the roe and not so much the meat.

“The top guys in the fleet here are always going to outfish the other 90%. Most of the guys were lucky to catch a few hundred pounds. The Thanksgiving front wasn’t much to speak of and not that many were able to capitalize on this past front. We’re basically in the middle of the season right now,” Flathman explained.

After the new year, most mullet are done spawning, significantly lowering their value. In my younger days, I did a little mullet fishing on some of the bigger fronts when people needed help. You need to be ready to go on a moment’s notice and you head out when the fish are running, no matter the time or weather.

You’re looking for fish that are schooling up in the passes heading offshore where they will spawn. Big groups of hundreds of thousands of fish all leave at the same time from shallows and backwaters to offshore where rough water lets them make mullet babies for the future.

Throwing a 15- to 20-pound cast net for hours on end without much of a break, you may get lucky and hit a hundred or more pounds of mullet in a throw as they school up. A bad throw and you’ll be hung up on rocks or structure in a pass and you’re out a few hundred dollars for the price of a net. It doesn’t take long before your hands are cramping and you can’t even make a fist.

A full day and your back hurts, your legs hurt, your hands are cut up from slinging fish all around and you can’t stop until the fish stop running. It’s typically cold, wet and tiring from balancing in windy weather. By the end, you want your boat riding so low in the water it is borderline unsafe. It’s not uncommon for a boat to go down because fishermen push for more fish than the boat can handle.

It’s been a yearly cornerstone out of Cortez and other fish houses for generations, but is the fishery slowly dying?

“The old timers talk about runs and have pics that seem made up because they are not even close to comparable to today’s fishery,” said Flathman. “We used to have blacks (mullet schools appearing black in the water) the size of football fields charge out the river so tight and big that there could be 50 boats or more on them and they would go right out the river.”

But the weather this year hasn’t allowed that, and what seems like a lack of fish is also met with a lack of demand from foreign buyers. Red roe mullet primarily end up heading to East Asian markets, but in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, those markets were shut down.

This year China allowed a mullet season, something that rarely happens due to overfishing. More fish entered the market, meaning local prices stayed stagnant. Even as more markets have slowly opened for U.S. fish, the demand has never returned to the glory days of fish being $2.50 a pound with some boats bringing in 10,000 pounds a day, a modern-day gold rush that led many to jump in.

Now at $0.85 to $1 a pound and with fewer global buyers, the season may leave many like Flathman looking for other monetary opportunities.

“The overhead and cost of operation rising and fish prices dropping or at best remaining the same,” he said. “Crabbing has been OK. This last storm got the crabs moving pretty good.”