There is a week in early September when the whole east coast of Florida changes its mind. The first mullet schools come down the beach out of the north, dark patches in the trough that move like weather, and everything that eats a mullet quits whatever it was doing and follows. Tarpon, jacks, sharks, big blues in a good year. And snook, which have spent the summer stacked around the inlets and now have no reason to go anywhere at all, because dinner is walking to them.
Sebastian Inlet is a narrow cut between the Indian River Lagoon and the Atlantic, and when the tide runs through it the water piles against the rocks and the bridge pilings and builds exactly the sort of seam a snook was designed for. They sit behind structure, face into the current, and let it deliver. You fish the outgoing at night from the catwalk or the north jetty with a bucktail or a live mullet, and you put the bait up-current and let it wash down past the line where the lights end and the dark begins. That line is not a suggestion. A snook will hold six inches inside the dark and refuse to cross into the light for anything you own.
Then it eats, and you learn about the second half of the arrangement. A snook does not run for open water like a reasonable fish. It runs for the nearest object capable of cutting a leader, and at Sebastian the options are generous: barnacles on the pilings, the rip rap, the bridge itself. You get about two seconds to turn the fish before it makes a decision you cannot argue with, and the correct answer is to lock down and lean, which feels wrong every single time and is right maybe half of them. Everybody on that jetty has a story about the biggest one, and in every story the leader comes back cut clean.
The man next to us on Tuesday night was seventy if he was a day, fishing a rod with tape on the handle and a reel older than my truck, and he had two legal fish on the concrete before we finished ten casts. His method appeared to be standing in one place for four hours. He said the fish come by on their own schedule and the whole trick is being there when they do, which is either profound or useless depending on how tired you are when you hear it.
We landed one that went a hair over the slot and went back in, and we lost three that never showed us anything. Around two in the morning the mullet came through thick enough that the water sounded like rain, and for a while nobody said a word, because nobody had a hand free. Harvest season on the Atlantic coast opens the first of September, right as the bait arrives, which is either careful management or the luckiest bit of scheduling in the state.
Early starts and long runs, with her stitched into the crown. See our embroidered boat hats, drawn from a photo of your own boat.