About Us

A lot of my favorite mullet run memories didn’t come from a fishing report. They came from being at the beach when something happened to be going on.

One late afternoon I took my two boys to Mickler’s Beach. We had a couple of rods, a cast net and maybe an hour of daylight left, with no real idea what we’d catch, if anything.

Then a school of mullet came working down the beach, close enough to shore to reach with the net. I waded out into the surf and threw it, and as soon as I started pulling it back I could feel the weight. It was full.

The boys came running down the sand, and for the next few minutes we stood there laughing at a pile of flipping mullet and trying to figure out what we were going to do with all of them. There was no special technique involved. We were just in the right spot at the right time, which is a big part of why the mullet run is so much fun.

We spend a lot of holidays at my mother-in-law’s house in Cape Coral, which sits on a canal. Sit out back long enough and you start noticing the mullet. You hear one jump, then another, and some days they’re popping out of the water all the way across the canal.

It never gets old. You can be out there at Thanksgiving or Christmas, talking with family, and hear one slap the water behind you. Before long I was watching for them on purpose and wondering about them. Where were they headed? Why were there so many today and hardly any yesterday? Was it the tide, the water temperature, the wind?

Once you start asking those questions, it’s hard to stop.

Between that afternoon at Mickler’s and all the time on that canal, I kept coming back to how hard it actually is to find mullet when you want them.

Every fall the posts start showing up on Facebook, Reddit, the fishing forums and the local groups: “They’re at the inlet.” “Big schools heading south.” “Mullet everywhere this morning.” The trouble is that by the time you read one, the fish have often moved on. Conditions change, and a stretch of beach that was empty at breakfast can have thousands of mullet running past it by lunch.

I couldn’t find one place that pulled all of that together for the whole Florida coast, so I started building FloridaMulletRun.com.

The question behind it is a simple one: where are the mullet right now?

There will never be a perfect answer, because fishing doesn’t work that way. But if you put sightings from anglers next to water temperature, tides, wind, weather and what we know about how the run moves down each coast, you get a much better guess than any single Facebook post can give you. (If you want the details, here’s how the Opportunity Score works.)

It might help someone decide between fishing Jacksonville Beach or driving farther south. It might tell a dad that mullet are moving past his local beach, so he can take the kids down after school. Or it might put someone who’s in Florida for a week in front of a big school of mullet getting blown up by tarpon, sharks, snook and jacks.

Those are the days people remember. I still think about pulling that net up on Mickler’s with my boys standing next to me, and about evenings on that Cape Coral canal watching mullet jump while everyone else was inside talking.

That’s really all this site is for: helping more people find the mullet, and maybe make a few memories of their own.

Every report makes the map more useful for the next person. Log a sighting, check the latest conditions, or get in touch if you’ve got a local tip.