RESOURCES · HOOK AND COOK
How does Hook and Cook work at Grassy Flats?
You book a boat through us, you catch fish, and that fish is dinner. Same day.
01
BOOK A BOAT
02
CATCH FISH
03
MARKET PREP
Matt Sexton owns this place and set the program up, and I'm going to let him do a lot of the talking here because he says it better than I can write it. The short version is that there is no version. Half day or full day.
Offshore or on the reef. The Rhum House kitchen plating it for you, or you pulling a Green Egg out of the market and cooking it yourself under the straw roof out back.
Forget the boat for a second and picture the back half of the day.
Sun going long and orange, salt dried on your forearms, that specific good tired you only get from being on the water since seven in the morning. Charcoal smell coming up off the grill under the straw roof, first fillets going on, and they're yours. You caught them. Your buddy is cracking a beer and telling the story wrong on purpose, loud, hands going. Your kid is up on a chair trying to see over the lid with pool water still running off him onto the concrete. And your wife has a cocktail in her hand and she is finally, actually relaxed. No phone. Nowhere to be at seven. Nobody asking her what the plan is.
That's the thing we're selling. Everything below is just how you get there.
Ask Matt if there's a structure to any of it and this is what you get:
He also has a sandwich. Roast beef they make in house, baby Swiss, horseradish, hot dog mustard, peppers, lettuce, onion, and he'll tell you the horseradish is supposed to make you want to sneeze. That's the idea behind this whole program. Same counter, same ingredients, nobody walks out with the same thing.
So this page walks the whole thing. How you book the boat and who you end up with. What the trips actually are. What happens to your fish the second you hit the dock. Who cooks it and where you eat it, which is the part you get to decide. What it runs. And who should skip this and go do something else.
BOOKING
How do you book the fishing charter?
Through us. Front desk, or somebody catches Matt at the market while he's standing around waiting on a coffee, which is honestly how a lot of these start. Screen door going, blender running somewhere behind the counter, guy in flip flops asking what there is to do down here. Matt asks what he's trying to get out of the week, and then:
You end up on one of our boats or out with a captain Matt has fished with for years. No commission comes off that guide for sending you. He's direct about why:
If you know the verbiage, use it. Say you want a three quarter reef day, yellowtail and grouper, and you'll get something like this back:
And if you have no idea what you want, if you just know that deep sea fishing in the Keys has been sitting on your list for twenty years, that's most people. Say that instead.
THE CHARTER
What kind of fishing trip are we talking about?
Going offshore for mahi you might run twenty miles in one direction and forty or fifty in total. Flat gray water at seven that turns blue about the time the island goes small behind you, engines droning, coffee going cold in the holder, everybody quiet for the first hour. Then it's lines out and waiting, and the waiting is the deal you're making. Matt says it flat out:
Some mornings it's rough enough that he'll tell you straight he wouldn't recommend it. Then you're on the reef for snapper, yellowtail, mangrove, cero mackerel, and you come home with fish anyway.
Winter and spring is sailfish. Summer is mahi, spring is tarpon, wahoo runs the winter. What you go after gets settled a day or two out, sometimes that morning.
YOUR CATCH
What happens to your fish when you get back?
Boat gets cleaned, fish gets filleted, and then it goes up to the market.
Hose running on the deck, ice slurry going pink, pelicans doing what pelicans do about four feet away from you. It's the loudest, best smelling twenty minutes of the day.
At the market you split the catch. Whatever you're flying home with gets cured and dried and vacuum sealed right there, and you can hear that machine thunk down over and over while you stand there in a wet shirt figuring out how much of this you're actually going to eat tonight. There's an added cost depending on how far you take the packing. Everything else stays for dinner.
Mikey is the butcher and one of Matt's oldest friends. Watch him work that counter for ten minutes. Hands moving, no wasted motion, talking to you the whole time without looking up. That's a guy chasing mastery at something most people never think about once.
THE MEAL
Who cooks it, and where do you eat it?
However you want, and I mean that literally. This is the part of the day that's yours to decide.
The Rhum House
Most people hand it to the Rhum House kitchen. Give the fish over at the dock, go get in the pool, come back to it plated. Ceiling fans turning, warm light coming off the water, rum on the rocks sweating on the table, and then the plates start landing and it's yours, the thing you were fighting four hours ago. Matt makes the case for it better than I can:
Cook it yourself
Then there's the other version, and almost nobody knows this one exists. You take a Green Egg from the market and cook out back under the straw roof yourself. Matt on it:
Charcoal going, kids running back and forth from the pool soaking wet, somebody's cooler open on the ground, that first hiss when the fish hits the grate. You're standing there with tongs in one hand and a beer in the other and you've got no reservation to make and nowhere to drive. Some families run their entire week like this and never open a menu once.
Either way, tell us at the dock which direction you're going. That's all the heads up anybody needs.
THE DAY
What does a real Hook and Cook day look like?
I asked Matt to walk me through the last one. This is it, almost word for word.
Guy books a half day and wants to go offshore, so four hours, running for mahi. They come in with five or six tuna and a couple of mahi. Boat cleaned, fish filleted, everything up to the market, part of it cured and dried and vacuum sealed for their flight out of Fort Lauderdale the next day.
Then they told him what they actually wanted, which was the pool.
So that's what they did. Rest of the afternoon horizontal, drinks coming, sunburn setting in, fish handled by somebody else.
That night the Rhum House sent it out. Blackfin tuna sashimi, cold and clean. Tuna tartare. Mahi three different ways coming out of that kitchen one plate after another.
And they still flew home with a couple of bags of fish.
Full days hit different. Seven to three and you come back cooked, sun stunned, ears still ringing from the engines. Matt's description:
Dinner is still there when you come around.
THE STAY
What is the point of doing this at a resort instead of a rental house?
You can rent a house down here and hire a captain yourself. I asked Matt why anybody should do it here instead, and his answer had nothing to do with logistics.
That's the part that sells itself. You shower, you come down, and by nine you're at the bar with a rum and ice telling somebody about the one that came off at the boat, and the bartender already knows what came off which boat that day. Guy two stools down runs a skiff and starts telling you where he was this morning.
Matt compares it to après ski and he's right. Everybody wants to end up back at the lodge talking about how hard they went.
He's had guests describe the place as staying at an old friend's house. I'd take that over a lobby.
COST
What does Hook and Cook cost?
The charter is the big line and it moves with the boat and the fuel. Low end of a half day on a smaller boat is around [VERIFY $650]. A full day offshore can top [VERIFY $2,000], and the gap is mostly fuel. Forty or fifty miles round trip on a big outboard costs what it costs.
Prep and cooking are billed separately from the charter and depend on how much you want done. Fillets to a table is one number. Curing, drying, and vacuum sealing a cooler to fly home is another.
THE FIT
Who should skip this?
If the fishing is the whole trip and the money is the thing, you don't need a charter to eat well here. Bring a cooler and a couple of rods, post up at Tom's Harbor Bridge with frozen shrimp, and Matt will tell you himself you can end up with about what the guy who spent twelve hundred on a reef trip came back with. We watch it happen every season, cooler through the lobby, rods in the elevator.
And if you want a boat at eight and a table at seven with no conversation in the middle, this is going to feel like a lot of conversation. The whole thing runs on somebody asking you questions. Matt's version:
FAQ