At 6:45 a.m., when Benito Cabrera entered the iconic Harriette’s restaurant in Key Largo, a cup of black coffee and small container of brown sugar were set immediately before him, just as they are on any morning he arrives to the same table at this same time.
He’s on a schedule for another 7:30 fishing trip, and his breakfast was brought without an order, too. He’s a known commodity here, just as he is on the waterways across South Florida, though he’s often known by a different name.
“Miami Mutton Man,” his long-sleeved fishing shirt and hat read, same as his social-media accounts. It’s a family affair, too, as his phone pings during breakfast and his son, Kevin, or Miami Mutton Man Jr., says he’s already fishing in a boat near the Dania Beach pier and the mutton are biting.
“He’s as crazy about fishing as I am,” Cabrera says.
Sometimes you need a reminder of how special South Florida is. For some, that means playing golf or tennis in the winter. Others bet on horses or raise tropical gardens. And for some of us it’s a morning on the water that has been Cabrera’s office since he started a second act to his life as a fishing guide.
We were in 50 feet of placid ocean water one recent morning, the outside world gone, as the Mutton Man worked with an uneducated crew of myself, my son, Casey, and friend Ed Bustamante. He dropped a deep line to the bottom off one side of the boat then began teaching his technique of catching yellowtail snapper, the skittish fish popular in South Florida restaurants.
His methodology started with a bag of chum and an overhand toss of a scoop of oats behind the boat to bring up the school of yellowtail. A single cast is made just beyond that oats trail and the rod is whipped down into the water a few times to properly release the line with the current.
With his first cast, Mutton Man brought in a yellowtail from the pod that appeared 40 feet from the boat. My turn. I had zero coordination the first time for this technique of whipping the rod and moving the line. Or the second time. Or the …
“Fish on,” someone said, a hallelujah chorus on mornings like this.
It wasn’t on my rod. It was the deep line on the other side of the boat. The rod was bent double, the line running out. Casey grabbed it. The choreographed chaos began of people moving and shouting and guessing what it might be. A grouper? Barracuda? Each fish fights a unique way.
As it worked, the first line in the water this morning was the perfect first fish for our Mutton Man trip: A 10-pound mutton snapper. By afternoon’s end, we had nine decent yellowtail and five muttons with the biggest at 13 pounds.
This is the reef fishing Mutton Man has made a career of after working for decades in a South Florida print shop. Back then, he lived his passion on weekends, fishing the waters he had since arriving from Cuba in his youth. The road toward making that a career began with his posting fishing reports, just for fun, in an outdoors publication.
People began asking his thoughts, then his guidance. Friends suggested there was a market for him as a guide. It’s not just pro athletes who create their careers. By 2010, Cabrera had retired from the print shop and was catching fish with clients as now posted on his Instagram account of @MiamiMuttonMan.
In the fishing world, the golden rule is not to tell anyone your spots and the fellow fisherman is your enemy. Cabrera isn’t protective from fellow prospectors. His spots are now your spots. His methods are taught to be yours, too.
He hops on your boat and has demands for certain equipment for his kind of fishing. But his idea of a good day is told over breakfast of a trip the previous day. The man had caught mutton previously, but wanted his son to catch one.
“The son got two,” Mutton Man said.
It’s the quietest time on the sports calendar, a good time to remind yourself why South Florida is special. Take that bike ride. See that tropical garden. Or go out on the vast office of those people like The Mutton Man, to the beckoning water that never changes even as it changes every day.