Mullet Fishing Fort Desoto Park

So last weekend I had off, a very much needed rest from my full time job, so I decided that I would head on down to Fort Desoto to some saltwater fishing. This time though I wasn’t going to the Fort Desoto piers like a normally do, I was going there to try and get some mullet. See the good thing about mullet is there is no bag limit for them, and there is no size limit for them in Florida as far as I know, and even if there was, I would never get a chance to catch that many. The thing about mullet is that they like to travel in schools, and if you can guess where the mullet might be and where the mullet might be, you have a far better chance of catching them by quantity.

So I got a couple of fishing rods and my tackle box, along with a small cooler and a 7 foot cast net. Lit up a cigarette and I was on my way to Fort Desoto Park. I only live about 45 minutes away from there so I try and fish it as often as I can. I stopped at the 7-11 and got a bag of ice just in case I did happen to catch some mullet fish. Now when you first enter that long road to Fort Desoto, you will pass through a toll, then I believe there are a couple of bridges on the way to the park, you will always see people fishing from the bridges there. The bridge that I decided I was going to go after was the one right before you hit the beach, it’s a very small bridge and there are rarely people fishing there. There is a small boat ramp there and that’s the main purpose of the bridge, as there is also a small parking lot there also.

Anyways I pulled the car up there, got my cast net and my beer, and headed over to the right side of the bridge. Now if you are fishing here with a cast net you must be extremely careful on where you throw the net, if you have an expensive cast net I would not recommend you throwing it unless you are a 100 percent sure that you are going to catch something. There are rocks every at the bottom, which is only about 6 feet deep. I have really torn up some good cast nets fishing for mullet there, so you can decide at your own risk. This may not be the best spot at Fort Desoto to try and catch some mullet fish, but if you know what to look for you can walk away with plenty of dinner for you and your family and friends.

The thing you have to look for when fishing for mullet, is, mullet. Look for little ripples in the water, and also look for mullet that are jumping, mullet love to jump. Have the cast net ready in hand to throw because when they swim by you will only get one shot. This particular morning I had spotted a couple of them, and made a couple of casts, I had brought up some small shiners and a couple of very small mullet, not even big enough to keep, not to me anyway. After patiently waiting for about 20 minutes or so I had a great cast, and when I brought up the cast net inside was about 10 mullet, some of them were really good size too. So I immediately ran and got the cooler full of ice, cut the mullet at the head to bleed them, and hastily put them on ice.



Now if you happen to catch a couple of small mullet and you don’t think that they are big enough to eat, there is another thing that you can do to make great use of them. Snook fishing, if you have been following along with me, I had said in the “how to fish for snook” post that snook love to eat live mullet. You could put the mullet in a bait bucket and then head down to one of the piers, having a live mullet you will have an advantage of catching snook over the other people that are fishing for the same thing.


mullet fish, fort desoto, saltwater fishing

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