"How can I catch a tarpon and where's a good place?" A young boy asked that question during a local television call-in fishing show, and I thought, wow, now that one calls for multiple answers. Actually, I would answer that young angler by asking a few questions of my own. What kinds of rods and reels do you own? Will you fish from a boat or terra firma? And, just how hard do you want to work, son, and just how much time can you spare?
A tarpon jumps most frequently early in the fight.
When matched to the appropriate tackle, tarpon are as dynamic as a gamefish can be. Giant tarpon make headlines, but baby tarpon provide top-notch sport too, if that's more your speed. There are many tarpon fishing methods, the fish's size range is wide, and fishable inshore tarpon water stretches from Texas to Florida to the Carolinas. It would not be exaggeration to call the silver king an "everyman's fish."
The Deep Alternative
Tarpon fishing is never a sure thing, but plunking a bait or jig on top of a few thousand of these beasts stacked in a pass is as close to it as you'll get. Passes and inlets hold double appeal for tarpon. For one, they serve as orientation points for summer spawning migrations, thought to take the fish far offshore. The second reason is more obvious: Connections between estuaries and open ocean are chockfull of suitable forage, from mullet to shrimp to crabs. Florida has a bunch of well-established tarpon fisheries in Gulf passes and Atlantic inlets. Among them is Boca Grande Pass in southwest Florida, Government Cut in Miami, the Egmont shipping channel into Tampa Bay, many of the channels in the Keys, and West Pass in Apalachicola Bay. But there are plenty others. Anglers try to match what the fish are feeding on, figure out when that feeding is occurring, and position baits at the optimal level in the water column. It's hard to go wrong fishing a live bait in a pass.
In Boca Grande, the prime forage includes a little member of the grouper family known as a squirrelfish; pinfish and crabs are also popular. In Government Cut, a big fat shrimp is number one, followed by a crab or mullet. Under the Sunshine Skyway over Tampa Bay, it's a big threadfin herring or menhaden. Crabs, mullet and pinfish are both popular in the Keys.
Usually, pass tarpon are feeding deep, regardless of the splashy rolls and tail flips you might see on the surface (spring tide summer crab runs being a notable exception). You can take a bait into the zone either with a jighead, such as a Hank Brown Hookup or bucktail of suitable size, or with some form of breakaway sinker that falls off the leader when the fish strikes. Some fishermen use copper wire to loosely wrap a sinker to the swivel and leader. Another way is to double over a few inches of your leader and push the loop through an egg sinker, using a rubber band as a temporary stopper. When the fish bites and tightens the leader, the loop collapses and pulls the rubber band through the sinker. The common approach when livebait fishing is to drift, and in busy passes like Boca Grande, courteous anglers start at the top of the pack and wait their turn. Anchoring and chumming with menhaden or some other smelly dead fish typifies the inlet fisheries of North Florida. The technique is undoubtedly useful elsewhere, but for Pete's sake don't anchor in an established drift? route like Boca Grande or Government Cut!
Tides are everything in pass fishing, but what confounds many anglers is that the bite is not always predictable weeks ahead of time. What usually happens is the fish fall into a rhythm that may change from week to week--some days feeding best on the falling tide, others on the incoming. You might ask around at a tackle shop after making a good-will investment in jigs, hooks, sinkers and live bait.
Florida is by no means the only place to hunt pass tarpon. As water temps climb into the upper 70s, schools circulate throughout the Gulf of Mexico, from lower Texas to Alabama (the silver king happens to be Bama's state fish, by the way). Another body of fish ranges up the east coat in fishable concentrations as far north as South Carolina. The mouth of the Mississippi River is in some ways like a giant pass, and here, in Louisiana, there's a solid run of summer tarpon. July through September, anglers often spot rolling fish out of Southwest and South passes, as well as Grand Bayou, advised Capt. Brandon Ballay of the Venice charterboat Aw Heck. "They don't really come into the passes like they do down in Boca Grande Florida but instead they hang out off the main channels," he said. "Here there's lots of running and looking, and tides don't seem to matter. These fish are always hunting." A circle hook wired temporarily to a jighead and plastic tail--called a Coon Pop hereabouts--is by far the most popular lure for Lousiana tarpon fishing. The jighead falls off at the strike.
Historically, Texas was a major tarpon center, and a lot of the action took place around the major passes. A 1937 photo shows Franklin D. Roosevelt with a tarpon landed at the Port Aransas jetties. You can see it at www.texastarpon.net, a website started by state tarpon enthusiasts. The fishery has waxed and waned over the years, due to overfishing in Mexico or interruptions in freshwater flow, depending on who you talk to. Says Galveston guide Mike Williams, "All the fishing is offshore now, in a corridor between 34 and 42 feet of water." Williams uses a fishfinder to locate schools, then freelines a dead shad or casts a sinking plug.
When a fish jumps, lower your rodtip to the water.
Pass fishing is a big part of the game in Georgia. Capt. Greg Hildreth cut his teeth fishing tarpon in Apalachicola, Florida, and now pursues the fish with basically the same techniques he used there. "Usually, we'll anchor and chum with pogies on a series of sandbars out of St. Andrew Sound. But we've got a lot of places to plug cast for tarpon, too--sometimes you'll see 150 to 300 fish rolling in some of our coastal rivers." Hildreth mentioned the Altamaha, St. Catherine's and Savannah rivermouth as viable spots for light-tackle fishing.
Hit the Beach
Seasoned tarpon fishermen live by an old rule: Bow to leaping fish. You can test that theory to the max come spring and summer off Florida's sandy beaches. Plan on a dawn start--it's the early angler who bows to the most leaping poons.
On Florida's Atlantic coast, bait is the key. Find out what tarpon are chewing and where that bait's holding, and you're halfway home. Or at least you'll know where to begin scouting. Top early-spring Atlantic waters are those that are warmest--for instance off Fort Pierce and Stuart. On Florida's Gulf coast, daisy-chaining tarpon gather in nearshore Gulf shallows to spawn come spring. Shorelines surrounding Little Captiva Pass and skirting Cayo Costa are dependable for finding such early-run fish.
Whether you're fishing out of Longboat Key on the Gulf Coast or, say, Flagler Beach in Northeast Florida, the drill is to is motor along at dawn and watch for rolling fish or bait pods from a distance. Tarpon will hammer pogy schools just off the sand, and dive-bombing pelicans point the way to such feeding frenzies. Other mornings, tarpon reveal their location by rolling in the small spring swells, or better yet, by launching themselves through bait schools.
