Tarpon don’t nibble.
The first thing you notice when a Silver King strikes your bait is a searing sensation in your shoulders as you hang on to your fishing rod while the all-muscle-fish makes its initial run of a hundred yards or more in ten seconds or less.
That’s faster than NFL wide receiver-fast. And those guys can do the 40-yard dash in 4.4 seconds.
The second thing you notice is there is not a lot of fishing line left on your spool.
That’s unless you planned on this happening. If you did, then your attention turns to what comes next.
The third thing you’ll notice is the line starts to vibrate. That’s because the line is slicing through the water from south to north, no longer peeling away from you at 35 miles per hour.
Things happen fast when the line starts to vibrate. The moment when you’ll have a good sense of whether you are going to best the tarpon, or the tarpon is going to best you, is …. just … about … to … happ: *!WHOOSHHH!* ... WAP-WAP-WAP-WAP-WAP ... *!SPLASH!*
Tarpons often swim super-fast and then go airborne (the “WHOOSH”) to get rid of this new thing in their mouth. It shakes its head back and forth. To counter-balance, it flaps its caudal fin making it look as if it’s tail walking on water (the “WAP-WAP-WAP-WAP-WAP”).
If it doesn’t end up spitting the hook — which if it does the barbed missile will fly right back toward your head — the tarpon more often than not will land on your line (the “SPLASH”), break it, and swim away with your hook, which will dissolve in short order and fall out of its jaw.
It takes about 25 seconds to read that last paragraph. Odds are good that that is how long your fight will last with the silver-green muscle-queen: Megalops atlanticus.
And such a bad beat down around your fishing pals is embarrassing. Admit it.
Women take top honors
Jill Sanders and Mary Laser had a better time fishing than all of the guys as the women picked up two top spots in the Fort Myers Beach Tarpon Hunters Club annual tournament.
Sanders won the Tarpon Club’s Angler of the Year Award for catching and releasing the most tarpon during this year’s tournament.
Laser won first place for the most tarpon caught-and-released on light tackle, her third win in that division.
“If you've never tarpon fished, I mean, there's nothing like it,” Laser said. “You can go out and just have a quiet day on the water looking for them. Or you could have a day where you catch one and it shoots out of the water and you've just never experienced anything like it, so it's very exciting.”
The women received their trophies at Bonita Bills Restaurant on San Carlos Island near Fort Myers Beach recently.
That’s the same place the club holds its meetings on the first Wednesday of each month during the summer and fall months as tarpons are off the beaches of Fort Myers and Sanibel and, weighing in at more than 150 pounds, swimming in very shallow water near the sand.
“No matter what time of the year, to ‘jump’ or catch such a spectacular, feisty gamefish will give the angler such a fight that the memory shall never be forgotten,” the group has posted on its website.
At the 100-member tarpon club's recent annual fishing clinic at Bonita Bills, they undertook to teach those new to tarpon fishing how to do it and how to return the fish safe and alive back to the water. Club members fish in the western Caloosahatchee River, throughout the bays in Lee County, and out into the open Gulf of Mexico.
“This is our annual clinic where we give people a taste of catching tarpon,” said Don Taylor, the club’s president. “We give them some information on the tackle to use, the locations, the bait -- the techniques so that we can kind of get them catching the fish right.
“Because otherwise, they die,” he said. “We want to protect the fishery.”
Women anglers in the U.S. totaled nearly 20 million, which comprised 36% of all fisher people, according to a 2021 report by the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation. That was the most female participation the foundation had ever tallied, even as females fishing continued to grow by about 5% per year.
Tarpon capital of the world?
Tarpons were swimming about long before the Tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, and velociraptor, which were some of the last well-known dinosaurs before the mass extinction.
Female tarpons often lay more than 10 million eggs at sea. The eel-like larvae shrink at first, then grow to look like little tiny tarpons — and may not stop until they are eight feet long and weigh 300 pounds.
Tarpons are plentiful in West Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean Sea.
But the Gulf of Mexico, particularly Florida, is renowned for bountiful tarpon populations of impressive size and spectacular fighting ability.
Within Southwest Florida is the place many fishermen call the tarpon fishing capital of the world: Boca Grande Pass. The 80-feet-deep natural inlet is so popular it hosts “The World’s Richest Tarpon Tournament” with total prize money ranging from the mid-five figures to more than $100,000.
Tarpons are at home in passes and inlets. It’s where they often eat, how they move from bays to the open Gulf of Mexico, and with the tide usually going in or out, the water flows full of oxygen. Not only do the underwater pilings and debris in inlets allow for great ambush points for their prey, but the cover can be useful for tarpon hiding from things trying to eat them, like sharks.
But what is so special about Boca Grande is up for debate.
One theory is that being the deepest natural pass in Florida, and located close to where the Peace and Myakka rivers empty into Charlotte Harbor, Boca Grande Pass is a bottleneck that serves tarpons all sorts of smaller fish carried along with the raging underwater current.
At one time, a tarpon caught during tournaments would be killed for weighing and display. These days, environmental consciousness has ruled out most kill tournaments. Fishermen can still figure out the weight of the fish by measuring it while it is still in the water using a free guide found here.
Environmental reporting for WGCU is funded in part by VoLo Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to accelerate change and global impact by supporting science-based climate solutions, enhancing education, and improving health.
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