Golden Grey Mullet

The golden grey mullet will test your patience like nothing else in the harbour. You spot a shoal grazing along a sunlit wall, gold patches glinting on their cheeks, and watch them snub everything you put in front of them. Fish light, keep quiet and tempt one, though, and you have a clean, mild fish that few anglers ever bother to target.

How to spot it

Two mullet swim Cornish harbours, and one marking tells them apart: soft gold patches on the cheeks and gill covers, which the thick-lipped grey mullet lacks entirely. The back is greenish, fading through silvery-grey flanks to a clean white belly. It is a streamlined fish with a small, rather flattened head, small eyes, a small mouth and the thick lips of the mullet family. Two separate dorsal fins finish the picture, the front one stiffened with fine spines. At a typical 40 to 50cm, those gold cheek patches are the surest tell on the bank.

Where it lives

Golden grey mullet love estuaries and harbours, drifting in shallow water often just a foot or two over mud and sand. Around Cornwall they turn up in the Hayle estuary, the Helford river and around Falmouth, Flushing and Charlestown, where shoals graze quietly along a harbour wall on a rising tide. They show through the warmer half of the year, broadly July to November, and feed hardest on a still, sunny day as the tide pushes in. They need clean, well-flushed water to be at their best, both for the fishing and for the table.

Catching it

A small hook fished beneath a float is the classic method, with light line and a genuinely quiet approach; these are maddeningly shy fish. Sweetcorn, small pieces of prawn and bread are the baits to trust, and a little loose feed scattered to draw a shoal into your swim makes all the difference. Work the harbours and estuaries on a still, sunny day with a rising tide, watching for the swirls or dimpling rises that give feeding fish away. Fooling one takes patience and a soft touch. Tread lightly, keep the noise down, take only what you will eat and return the rest so the shoals keep grazing the walls.

In the kitchen

From clean, well-flushed water the golden grey mullet is a good eating fish: firm, white flesh with a mild flavour and a faint nutty note. Scale and score it, then roast or grill it with olive oil, sea salt, lemon and a few sprigs of herbs. Better still, pan-fry the fillets skin-side down, pressing them flat, until the skin goes thin and crisp. It takes happily to bolder company too: a Thai-style dressing of lime, chilli and coriander suits it as well as anything Mediterranean. Just be sure of your water; mullet from a stagnant marina is one to leave alone.