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JEFF KLINKENBERGLike the Bakers who came before him, John Baker makes his own nets to catch mullet in Tampa Bay.
ST. PETERSBURG - You know what would be nice? A big, fat mullet, gutted and split and fried, accompanied by grits and sweet iced tea. If not fried, then smoked - not in a store-bought machine, but in one of those backyard smokers that should be illegal in the city: a rickety wood shack about the size of a linen closet, heated with enough sizzling driftwood to flavor pink flesh without overcooking.
"I grew up on mullet."
If he were hungry enough, John Baker, the netmaker, could buy mullet at a seafood store. But it is not his style. Four generations of his family have caught mullet, and smoked them or fried them, and eaten them for supper, dinner or breakfast. He prefers to catch his own mullet and do all the work himself.
There is one reliable way to catch a mullet, a flashy, silvery fish found everywhere in Florida where water tastes of the sea. If you are sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time, and happen to witness a fish jumping enthusiastically, like it should have feathers instead of fins, you have no doubt seen a mullet.
Mullet are vegetarians. It is possible to catch them on hook-and-line, but more trouble than it is worth. The best way - the way John Baker, 59, recommends - is throwing a net over a nice school of passing mullet on a cold day in December. Mullet are never thicker than in December, when, heavy with roe, they swim in immense schools waiting for the urge to spawn.
Of course, throwing a cast net is more complicated than it sounds. It takes coordination and strength to do well. It takes a serious net. Finding a serious net is harder than it used to be.
Back when John Baker was growing up in St. Petersburg, hard-core mullet men made their own nets. A few old netmakers around town, weaving nets in their backyard, supplied the rest of the market.
Everything has changed. A few old-timers with failing eyes and fingers cramped with arthritis still hang on, but for the most part netmaking is a lost art. You can buy them at selected tackle stores, and a few sporting good emporiums, but for the most part they are put together in foreign lands as cheaply and as quickly as possible.
"Making nets was a family tradition for us," Baker says. He learned how from his father. His father learned from his father. His grandfather learned from his great grandfather. The sun had yet to rise on the 20th century.
Bakers built nets, and used them, in St. Petersburg, on Lewis Island. Don't search for "Lewis Island" on a modern map. Now Lewis Island is called Coquina Key. Connected to the mainland by two bridges, it's an island on Tampa Bay crowded by apartments, middle-class housing, tennis courts and roads.
If you find a part of Coquina Key that isn't covered by pavement or St. Augustine grass, dig down. You'll probably come up with a Lewis Island mullet bone or two. The Baker family might have tossed them there.
"Olde Florida Netmakers"
John Baker likes old things. He also is one of those men who can do anything with his hands. A hammer, a saw, a plane - he is comfortable with tools. A firefighter for years, he is now retired, which gives him more time to build fishing nets and throw them over spawning December mullet he can fry up or smoke.
He carries his net in the bed of his 1949 midnight black Ford. He has owned the truck for a quarter of a century. He took it apart, put it back together, painted it, loved it. It lacks air-conditioning, of course; he drives with windows open. Some old-timers swear they can smell a school of mullet from blocks away. Baker doesn't make the claim, but he is good at finding mullet whatever the reason.
There's a sign on the door of his truck. It says "Olde Florida Netmakers" and includes the phone number 343-1575. It advertises the little business he operates with his son, Jason, and their partners, Jeff Kirschner and Glenn Cihak.
They started the business last year. But all of them, Floridians, have been building nets from childhood. The difference is they hope to get paid now.
"Nobody expects to get rich," says Jeff Kirschner. For him, netmaking is a night job or something to do on weekends. Like his friend Jason Baker, Kirschner is a chiropractor. "Jason and I fish a lot for fun. We both like to throw cast nets. We always would talk about cast nets, and how hard it was to find a good cast net. So we decided to build them ourselves."
They build them at the Seahock Flooring Center in St. Petersburg. Glenn Cihak, their partner in the net enterprise, is an owner of the floor business and lets them use the building. A flooring store is a strange place to build cast nets. In a perfect world, the men would be weaving nets while hunkered beneath a cabbage palm on the shore of Tampa Bay. Mullet would be leaping in the bay and cooking in a nearby smokehouse.
But in modern St. Petersburg, where real estate is so valuable, they build their nets while sitting on a cushy carpet among mounds of fresh carpet. Out the back window is the Pinellas Trail used by joggers and skaters and cyclists. When the wind is blowing, at least they can smell cooking fish. A few blocks away is a restaurant called Crabby Bill's.
"This is going to be a very small business at best," Jeff Kirscher goes on. "It's just going to be us building the nets. Why just us? Because it's hard to get young people to do this work. It's time-intensive. It's detail. It's manual labor."
Their nets cost more than those commonly found quickie nets. A small mullet net costs $120 or so. Something bigger is more expensive. How come? It's all in the knots - hundreds and hundreds - and taking the time to tie them properly. It is also about spacing the weights that sink the net just right. They even make their own weights.
"A poorly made net will not open completely when you throw it," says Kirschner, 35. "Our nets open completely. Nice and flat."
Of course they think their nets are the best on the waterfront. Some will agree; others disagree. Fishers like to argue as much as they like catching fish. Fishers also tend to be loyal. The net they bought a decade ago from Old Salty has to be better than the new.
Commercial netters - they catch mullet by the thousands in December and sell the roe in Asia - are especially picky about their nets. Often they own a half dozen. They'll throw a net over a mullet school, tie the net to the boat, then throw a second net and a third net and maybe a fourth until the school has dissipated.
Nobody hates a bad fishing net more than a commercial fisher.
Life on Lewis Island
Mullet made Florida possible. The aboriginal people who were here before the Europeans depended on them for life. They speared them and caught them in nets made from palms thatched together. When the Panfilo de Narvaez expedition landed in Boca Ciega Bay in 1528, the people known as the Tocobaga were living along the shore. The original Pinellas residents subsisted on oysters and mullet.
Coastal pioneers continued the tradition. In St. Petersburg, poor Depression families didn't go hungry. They ate so many mullet their stomachs went in and out with the tide.
"When I was a kid, this schoolteacher I had - a nice refined woman who I'm sure went to a finishing school - asked the kids to do a speech on what they'd had for breakfast," John Baker says. "I told her all about mullet and grits. The idea that Crackers were eating fried fish for breakfast took the curl out of her cummerbund."
Such was life on Lewis Island.
"What a place to grow up. I'd walk around and pick up Indian arrowheads all day. I'd find old tools made of bone. One time, I found what looked like a human jawbone. There were rattlesnakes and all kinds of critters. At night we'd put the supper scraps in a frying pan and leave it out in the yard. We'd watch the foxes and the coons come out to eat."
In the summer, it was best to stay on the screened porch while watching wildlife.
"The mosquitoes were pretty ferocious. You could put your hand on the screen and the mosquitoes would turn the screen black where your hand was touching."
Even in the dog days of August, a Florida boy didn't feel the heat.
"We didn't have air-conditioning. Nobody did. But you didn't need it, really. It wasn't as hot back then as it is now. Now there's all the pavement that collects the heat all day. When I was a kid, it was woods and water everywhere. There were only two other families on the whole island."
It was quiet and dark.
"You could hear the mullet jumping. You could see all the stars."
His daddy, another John, would walk out on the dock and throw a cast net and catch mullet for the next morning's breakfast. When John was 9, he got his own net.
He never liked throwing from a dock. Still doesn't. He likes to wade in. He likes to feel the water lapping at his thighs. He watches for the dimple of the water caused by mullet noses and tails. He holds part of the net between clenched teeth and drapes the rest over his left arm and shoulder. Pivoting at the hips, left to right, he lets fly.
The mullet thrash in the net. He wades to the net, lifts the clump of the net that contains the mullet, and grabs them one by one. He breaks their necks, kills them fast, gets them bleeding, gets rid of the blood that will make the flesh taste strong.
Within an hour, they are in the frying pan or in the smoker. Know what a cooking mullet smells like to an old netmaker?
History. Family. Florida.