In Pine Island, December is measured in mullet, flashes of silver in a swirl of blue, as mile-long schools wander offshore to spawn. Fishing families in wooden boats take their place in the mangroves among ospreys and cormorants, waiting like those ancient birds for the annual migration. Nets in hand, they steady themselves amid the winter waltz of the mullet run.
Christmas Eve finds Shane Dooley standing on the tower of a flat-bottomed skiff, his 8-year-old son, Hunter, sitting between his legs. The boy squints down at a watery shadow flecked with white. “I see the tails, Dad!” he shouts. “Mullet, right there!”
On deck below, Shane’s father, Mike, releases a powder blue dinghy. Hunter scrambles down and jumps in with his 14-year-old brother, Dalton. The vessels drift, a seine net between them, connecting two boats and three generations. Among the last few commercial mullet fishing families left on Pine Island, the Dooleys are part of a centuries-old seasonal harvest.
Mullet are curious fish. Filter feeders that graze on plankton and algae, they don’t chase bait. After summering in rivers and brackish estuaries, the fish migrate to saltwater. Commercial fishermen wait in the mangroves, casting nets sized to let juveniles—‘finger mullet’—slip through and continue their spawning run.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Shane arcs the boat around the school, encircling it like a coin purse. The net’s floats bob on the surface and the weighted lead line sinks, pulling it down like a curtain. As Shane closes the loop, the net bulges with flashes of silver and gold.
The net comes in hand over hand, yard by yard. Leaning back, feet braced against the boat’s wooden ribs, the fishermen strain against the weight of their catch. They haul in several hundred pounds of mullet to be sold at fish houses and served for Christmas suppers up and down Pine Island.
Mullet have fed so many for so long that true Floridians ascribe them mystical powers, celebrating them with poetry and long-lost appellations. During the Civil War, mullet fed slaves, sharecroppers and coastal families. Some Southerners survived the Great Depression on mullet with grits and hushpuppies. Islanders, saved time and again by this fish, took to calling it the ‘mighty mullet.’
On the boat, under the Pine Island moon, the Dooley boys pluck fish from a handsewn net, passed down through generations. Fish spill onto the deck, forked tails drumming against bald planks. Hunter holds one up and grins. “Look at this big boy, Dad!” Shane lifts a yard of net, four-pounders scattered throughout. Hunter and Dalton reach back into the blue, a mirror of the sky above. In the offing, the seam between water and sky disappears, as if they’re on the edge of the universe and looking out at all that is or ever was.
Here, mullet fishing is not just a way to make a living. It is a way of life. When Juan Ponce de León tried to claim Florida for Spain in 1513, he found the Calusa weaving nets of palm tree webbing, catching boils of mullet off the beach. Settlers preserved the marbled fillets with smoke, time and a handful of salt. With the arrival of ice boxes, smoking mullet was no longer a necessity, but for many, it remains a divine pleasure—and one of the only regional delicacies still enjoyed in the place where it originated. Along some byways, you can still buy mullet smoked on sheet metal atop an oil drum. Look for chalkboard signs announcing “Old Florida lives here,” with a hand-scrawled picture of a wide-eyed mullet.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
Man fishing on boat florida mullet run tradition
One of Pine Island’s last commercial fishing families, the Dooleys spend Christmas Eve with net in-hand. Three generations take to the water, hauling in hundreds of pounds of mullet for restaurants and at-home holiday feasts across the region.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
Two boys fishing on boat with dog on dock florida mullet run tradition
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
Mullet in florida mullet run tradition
If the only constant on this swirling blue planet is change, nowhere is that truer than Florida. Between the 1994 gill net ban and a booming population, our coastal culture evolved. Diners started favoring offshore predators like grouper and snapper, large game species that feed on mullet. Some pronounced mullet a ‘trash fish.’
The quality that made mullet a coastal staple—abundance—might have made it easy to take it for granted. As boats got bigger and real estate boomed, a region that once took pride in eating the prolific species relegated it to the realm of catfish. Mullet were discarded as bycatch, chopped up as bait or flung in the sand in mullet tosses from the Panhandle to the Keys.
In a world where many wild seafood runs are imperiled, the mullet deserves more respect. This is one of the most sustainable fisheries on earth. And it remains one of the healthiest fish in Florida’s waters, brimming with omega-3s.
Turn down any Pine Island drive in December, and you’ll find maritime Christmas trees—cast nets hanging from the branch of a slash pine, draped in twinkle lights. In fishing families, gifts remain unopened until the mullet men come home.
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Fresh seafood spread florida mullet run tradition
The Dooleys carry forward tradition in spite of the challenges wrought by years of bans and unpredictable public demand. They feed their own, hauling in nets and trading with neighboring shrimpers, to fill the table with a bounty that both transcends time and roots itself in place.
At dawn, the Dooley boys’ stern tips toward home. Before they see their home creek, they smell it, billows of buttonwood smoke rising from backyard barrels as fillets turn a shade of sunrise on the rack. The result is nothing short of magic, a regional delicacy once found up and down these shores, now reserved for pockets of Old Florida. That may be changing, though. Chefs are reviving lost coastal traditions, aware that mullet, with its high oil content and firm flesh, can hold up to smoking, grilling, frying or pan searing. Younger generations are seeking out heritage food and “discovering” old classics. You can find mullet on menus new and old, from Nat Nat, a Naples neobistro, to Blue Dog Bar and Grill in Matlacha, where the fish is served smoked, scampi style, stuffed in tacos or over grits.
Mike was 12 when his father built him a skiff. He fished after school, unloading orange baskets at a Pine Island fish house for 10 cents a pound. “It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a lot of money if you didn’t have any,” he says. Early on, mullet fishing alone supported his family of four. “It’s been a good life. But you can’t do that anymore,” Mike says, nodding to Shane—a commercial mullet fisher, stone crabber, blue crabber and charter boat captain.
Mike built the grill for Shane and is teaching his grandsons how to build one, too. Hand-hammered tin panels and repurposed roofing shingles trap the smolder of native buttonwood as the fish smoke for seven hours. Tending to the smoker, Shane’s mom, Rhonda, shuffles smoked fillets onto a grating pan and plucks the white meat from every bone. A dash of Tabasco, a kiss of mayonnaise and a diced Florida Vidalia balance the fillet’s piquancy. The smoked mullet spread is served with saltines and a wedge of lime.
When it’s time to fry, an assembly line forms. Rhonda dips a fillet in egg wash. Her daughter-in-law, Sherry, rolls it in cornmeal. Rhonda’s sister, Summer, drops it in oil. In minutes, a platter of Dixie fried gold appears, cornmeal still dusting the air. Rhonda tucks it into a tablescape of fishing net and oyster shells. A portrait of the dish hangs nearby, painted by Rhonda’s late friend and Pine Island’s beloved artist Mel Meo, with an inscription that reads “Rhonda’s Mullet.”
Photography by Anna Nguyen
Green and blue mullet painting florida mullet run tradition
A school of mullet swims across a canvas by the late Pine Island artist Mel Meo for Dooley matriarch, Rhonda. When it’s time to fry, an assembly line forms: Rhonda dips fillets in egg wash, daughter-in-law Sherry rolls them in cornmeal and sister Summer drops them in oil. In minutes, Dixie fried gold lands on the family table.
“When Mel painted this back in our heyday, there were about eight fish houses,” she says. “Now there are two.” The turning point was the 1994 ban. Proponents said it was aimed at restoring fish stocks. Fishing families called it a lie cloaked in conservationist rhetoric. “Lordy, did we fight,” Rhonda says. They painted signs, wrote cookbooks and held fish fries to raise money to fight the ban. But for every dollar they earned, the other side had 20. “We begged them not to take our traditions from us. We begged for our jobs,” she says. “Commercial fishers just weren’t deemed as important as the tourist industry.”
The remaining mullet fishery on Pine Island—once 300 people strong—is now small enough to count on two hands. After the ban, Mike cut lawns for a living. His nets lay buried at the bottom of a ketchum sack until he learned how to throw a cast net and set a seine, an onerous method—but one that kept him on the water.
As evening casts a haze over the docks, Shane and Mike clean the fillet table, bagging mullet heads and backbones for crab bait. They save a dozen or so fillets for a neighbor, trading the fresh fish for a few pounds of harbor shrimp, sweeter than Gulf pinks. The rest of the morning’s haul will be toted to Jug Creek Marina & Fish House. Dalton shakes out a castnet twice as long as he is tall, ready for a late evening run to one of Shane’s honey holes. Afterward, he’ll clear and dry his net by a kindling fire.
Pine Island mullet is the centerpiece of the Dooley holiday meal, alongside blue crab and stone crab from Shane’s traps and oysters shimmied loose from their anchorage just beyond the groves. It’s not lost on the Dooleys that half their meal might fetch $10 at the market, while the other half is over $100. “They just don’t know. Give me the mullet, a thousand times over,” Shane laughs, lifting his hand to his heart, scales glittering knuckle to knuckle.
As the Dooley family sits down to supper, talk turns to Florida’s recent Amendment 2, protecting traditional fishing and hunting methods—words that could, perhaps, challenge the gill net ban that upended their way of life 30 years ago. Does anyone dare test the boundaries of the law? Plates pass from one generation to the next. Hunter piles fried mullet atop smoked, gold on gold.
Mike breaks a blue crab in half with knotted hands and wonders what’s left for his grandsons. Time and again, the mullet men have been told their ancient ways no longer belong. But the tides are shifting, as we learn tradition is simply another word for sustainability. Their way of life may be threatened, but it’s not extinct. “Last light is for last things,” Mike tells his boys. “And this ain’t that.”
Everywhere and all at once, mangroves settle in the moonlight. These emerald forests bear the scars of recent storms, branches cracked by hurricanes, knock-kneed roots holding fast through changing tides. “Hang on,” they seem to whisper. “Just hang on.”
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
Family enjoying dinner outside florida mullet run tradition
When Mike was young, being a mullet fisherman was lucrative enough to support a whole family. Today, his son, Shane, works as a commercial mullet fisher, stone crabber, blue crabber and charter boat captain to maintain the Dooleys’ life on the water.
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Photography by Anna Nguyen
Boy eating fresh seafood florida mullet run tradition