Monsteer snook, like this 24-pounder, often strike near mullet schools.

“Here they come! They’re pushing this way,” the captain excitedly warns us. “Look at their black backs right at the surface. They are heading right for us. Wait until they close in.”

No, we weren’t sight-fishing for schools of bull reds or tarpon. In fact, we weren’t even observing a sportfish or our intended quarry. It was a school of about 100 mullet moving toward our flats boat, black mullet in fact.

Nevertheless, Capt. Geoff Page was very excited about his discovery of the “pushing” mullet in the 3-foot-deep flats on the Indian River. He anticipated a bounty within that school that would excite all of us. As instructed, I waited for the school to move within casting range and then lofted my jig and green shad tail to the edge of the school. I started to slowly jig the 1⁄8-ounce bait back to our boat when a fish pounced on it and took off as I swept the rod into a hookset.

The trout—4 pounds, 12 ounces—was a nice fish and similar in size to one I had taken earlier. I was hoping for a larger snook, like the 10-pounder Page had taken from the previous school of mullet to which we had cast. His fish took a jerkbait out of a trough about a foot deeper than the surrounding grassflat. In the following two hours, we found four or five more mullet schools and took additional trout, jacks, bluefish and other species from the “muds” they were creating.

Page was born and raised in Sarasota and often fished the numerous inshore docks as a young man. He commercially gillnetted in the early ’80s and sport-fished primarily with live shrimp until the early ’90s. It was when an avid artificial bait tosser got Geoff into fishing jigs and soft plastics. He was hooked. In 1999 he began guiding, tapping knowledge he’d gained both as a commercial fisherman and sport fisherman.

As a gill netter, Page often noticed that redfish and other gamefish were mixed in with the mullet. Over the years since, he has developed his “It’s all about the mullet” theory, which has proven successful on Intracoastal waters all over Florida. He effectively utilizes the technique to find redfish, trout, snook and flounder in waters no deeper than four feet.

“On both coasts of the state, we have three types of mullet,” Page explains. “We have a silver (or white) mullet, which never get much bigger than a foot long and maybe one and one-half pounds. We also have what everyone views as baitfish, and they are called finger mullet, which can grow to be small white or black mullet or the fantail mullet. The black mullet is the one that we always see jumping and splashing.”

One stragegy for taking advantage of the mullet run is to plug shorelines where mullet travel.

Black mullet, also called striped mullet, have bluish-gray or green backs shading to silver on the sides with distinct horizontal black barrings and white bellies. Their fins are lightly scaled at the base and unscaled above, and their noses are blunt. The fish migrate offshore to spawn and fry produced then move back inshore, far up tidal creeks. The adults follow the fry inshore where they resume feeding on algae and small marine lifeforms.

“Sometimes the late fall mullet get so big and push so much water that the uninformed believe they are a school of redfish moving across a flat,” Page said, laughing, “The ones that fill up with roe in November and December (between Tampa Bay and Charlotte Harbor) can get up to 7 or 8 pounds. A black mullet adult probably averages 3 1⁄2 to 4 pounds year-round. The females with the blood-streaked yellow roe are always the biggest mullet.”

In the summer, black mullet scatter and the schools are smaller. There could be only 30 to 40 fish in an average size school then, according to Page, but there may be 20 or 30 bunches of them on a large flat. In the fall, the schools may go from 100 pounds of fish (30 fish at 3 1⁄2 pounds each) to massive 2,000-pound schools having maybe 400 individual fish. As a result, the cooler months from November through March are often the best times to follow the mullet.