The hardest part of fly fishing the fall mullet run isn’t matching the bait. Finger mullet are easy to imitate: a fat, three- to five-inch profile that pushes water. The trouble is getting one of your flies noticed and eaten inside a school of ten thousand real ones, which is why position, depth, and action end up mattering more than a perfect silhouette.

The run itself is the seaward, pre-spawn migration of striped mullet (Mugil cephalus, also called black mullet) out of the estuaries and down the Southeast Atlantic coast, from the Carolinas through Georgia and Florida, with the Gulf beaches running their own version. The adults are what’s spawning; the juveniles are what you’re imitating. Those juveniles, “finger mullet,” run three to eight inches, and they travel in schools thick enough to darken the water. Gamefish key on the fingers, not the adults, which is the only reason fly imitations are practical at all. As Conner has put it, if the fish were eating grown mullet, we’d all need 14-weights.