The Lost Key
Perdido Key is a barrier island at the far western end of the Florida Panhandle, in Escambia County, southwest of Pensacola. It runs about 16 miles, and State Road 292, called Perdido Key Drive here, follows its length. Spanish explorers named it in 1693. Perdido means lost.
Nearly 60 percent of the island is federal or state park land, split between the Johnson Beach area of Gulf Islands National Seashore at the east end and Perdido Key State Park, and that is why so much of it still looks empty. Past the end of the pavement at Johnson Beach, the sand goes on for miles, reachable only on foot or by boat. The dunes are also the last real home of the Perdido Key beach mouse, protected as endangered since 1985.
At the western end the island runs straight into Alabama. The Flora-Bama, a lounge and oyster bar on Perdido Key Drive since 1964, sits so close to the line that its most famous contest is thrown across it. Every April people step into a 10 foot circle on the Florida side and throw a dead mullet as far as they can toward Alabama, and thousands come to watch.
Why a mullet
The fish is not a random choice. Rick O'Connor, the Sea Grant agent for UF/IFAS Extension in Escambia County, calls striped mullet one of the most important commercial and recreational fish in the Pensacola Bay area and part of the local culture. He remembers family gatherings built around the mullet plate, fried fish with grits, baked beans, coleslaw and iced tea, and Lenten fish fries where mullet is the fish of choice. In 2018 and 2019 Escambia County landed 412,421 pounds of it, the top fish of the season, though more of it sold as bait than as food.
Mullet is oily, and it is best fried or smoked while it is very fresh; a fish that sits too long turns strong. Striped mullet spawn far offshore, with the peak from October through December, and fall is when the schools move. The roe has its own loyal following. If you have only met mullet on a hook, one plate fried the day it was caught will change your mind.
