hurricane milton sebastian inlet

A photo from the North Jetty on Friday after the storm.

Good morning all my Sebastian Inlet fanatics, I hope and pray everyone is alright, and made it through the hurricane alright, with little or no damage to your homes and property!! We’re good on my end, but wow what a wild ride it was, glad it’s over and hope there are no more to come! With that being said, here is what I know about the goings on at the inlet.

First off, the entire park is open both north and south side. They opened the north side on Friday, and the south side Saturday. And the good news is that the north jetty sustained NO DAMAGE! Everything is good to go! The only problem is the water quality; it is very horrible when I was down over the weekend! The outgoing tide was black as coffee and stained with tannic acid runoff from Sebastian River, which is fed by C54 canal, which is fed by Lake Okeechobee and the St Johns river. With all the rain they had in the center of the state, it has to go somewhere, and it all comes out the inlet on the outgoing tide, and then mixes with the absolutely very muddy ocean water, and just makes a huge mess; plus, there is a lot of dead sargassum weed floating around. But there are a lot of mullet around still, fingers and hand sized, which is a good sign.

It’s going to take about a week or so for the inlet and the surrounding coastal waters to clean back up some, but when it does, it should be “game on” again, if we don’t have any more storms, and there is another one out there they are watching, Nadine. Another thing that will help the bite pick back up when the water cleans up is the fact that the water temperature has dropped to 78 degrees, which will spice the fish up. After all, it is October, and the waters should be cooling back down from the 85 it was.

I didn’t see, or hear of any fish of numbers being caught, except for a couple redfish, and some juvenile snook that like to come out to play when if gets roughed up. Some catfish and jack crevalle were being caught as well. That’s pretty much all I have until things clean back up water quality wise. Everyone have a great week, it’s supposed to cool down a bit like fall weather this week.

UPDATE: At the inlet this afternoon (October 14), the redfish bite was off the charts. Anglers were catching redfish like crazy. I also saw folks catching Spanish mackerel, lady fish, jack crevalle and saw thousands of finger mullet.