Clean Water, Tons of Mullet

Kim with one of her many redfish caught with Capt. Mark Wright as the husband and wife team scouted the clear waters on the Indian River Lagoon!

We had some really nice weather at first light this past week. In fact on a couple of days the wind remained gentle well into the morning hours before the blow began.

On yet another scouting trip with my wife, Kim, we ran north in the Indian River Lagoon and found clean water, tons of mullet, ground cover and lots-o-fish. Many big (not quite Gators) trout milled around in the super shallow water basically ignoring the huge biomass of fingerling mullet only a hundred yards away.

Also ignoring the mullet were several small schools of slot sized redfish. I counted four individual groups and too many singles or doubles to count in the same waters as the aforementioned trout. While Kim received several short strikes to her Z-Man Diezel Minnowz, she only caught a single redfish at first light.

We moved out of the skinny water and into the zone where the mullet were thick and I quickly popped a nice trout on my Diezel Minnow. The fish shook the hook near enough to the boat that I got a good view of all twenty three or twenty four of her! We had no more bites in the mullet.

Pushing back into the skinny water I notice predators chasing fry fish in well under a foot of water. About the third time these runts cleared the water I was able to identify them as pinfish. We quickly changed from our four inch minnow imitations to three inch Z-Man Minnowz. While these lures were a bit too long to truly imitate the pinfish I was seeing all of the redfish didn’t seem to care.

While several fish ignored these lures many others thumped them so hard I could see the rod tip quiver and shake before Kim responded to the bite. Kim boated a few other redfish and had a few more shake-off the hook before we called it a day.

Returning the next day with Top-Water Tony I easily found our fish again. Again, the mullet were gathered in huge numbers and again they were mostly being ignored. The only real difference was in wind direction. The westerly wind from the day before became northerly in the night causing the water levels to drop by roughly three inches. The fish were there, but they were nervous to the point of unpredictability. Other than a couple of trout on Tony’s Skitterwalk the action was disappointingly slow.