 |
 |
|
|
|
Tarpon Fishing’s 7 Deadly Sins By Capt. Tony Petrella
It was six o’clock in the morning. Dawn hadn’t yet crept over the horizon, but already it was hot and muggy. There was hardly a whisper of wind and I just knew it was going to be a glorious day for tarpon fishing. A lot of early-run tarpon had been filtering into the south end of Charlotte Harbor through North Captiva Pass. Plenty of fish, and not much competition because most of the boats were stacked up over “The Hole” at Boca Grande a few miles north. Ed yawned loudly. “We’d better see some fish after you dragged me out of bed at three in the morning,” he mumbled. “Getting up was tough. So, where are the fish?” “Don’t worry about them,” I replied. “They’ll be here. You’d better get ready. Jump up on the casting deck, strip about seventy feet of line off that reel, and be ready to cast when I tell you to shoot him.” We stretched the coils out of the fly line and Ed was as ready as he was ever going to be during his three days of chasing tarpon on the nearshore/inshore Gulf of Mexico. The water’s surface was smooth, so I could see a long way from my perch atop the poling platform even in the low light of dawn. “Is that a fin?” I wondered. Yes. Then another and another and another. And they were coming right down the chute, headed straight for us. “Get ready, Ed.” I said quietly. “We’ve got a nice big pod coming our way. They look happy, and there aren’t any other boats around to spook ‘em. This should be good. Very good. “Just wait ‘till I tell you to make the cast. And remember to lay the fly out far enough ahead of the lead female so that you can bring that mullet imitation across their faces. Not AT their faces. No baitfish EVER attacks a predator. “OK. Get ready. Ready. Ready. Shoot him!” There was a swoooooshing on the backcast, then Ed lunged forward. The rod tip smacked the water so hard I thought I heard it snap, and the fly line was in a pitiful puddle fifteen feet from the boat. Meanwhile, tarpon were cruising past us like a World War II convoy in the North Atlantic. “Um, Ed, what happened?” I asked quietly. “I dunno,” he replied. “I guess I’m just not used to a rod this heavy. I never cast a twelve-weight before.” THE FIRST DEADLY SINUnfortunately, that sad lament (“I never cast a twelve-weight before”) is all too common. A lot of northern anglers are pretty good at tossing three-weight or four-weight rods for trout, bluegill and smallmouth. But they just don’t get it. Literally. Big fish (we routinely jump and/or boat tarpon in excess of one hundred pounds) need big gear. I’m a firm believer in what Robert Ruark said about hunting big game in Africa sixty years ago: “Use Enough Gun.” For tarpon, that means a twelve-weight. It also means practice, practice, practice. BEFORE The Main Event rolls around. If you’re a four-weight fanatic, step up to the bar slowly. Get ahold of an eight or nine-weight rod and practice with that for a while. Strive to shoot sixty or seventy feet of fly line. Accurately. The best way to reach that goal is to buy a broad-tip black laundry marker. From the joint of line and leader, measure back thirty feet and you will be at the “fattest” part of the fly line. That’s your load point. Paint the fly line all the way around with the laundry marker. Make a nine or ten-inch mark that you’ll be able to see easily. Now strip off fifteen more feet of fly line and make three three-inch-long hash marks. Strip off another fifteen feet of fly line and paint another ten-inch-long mark. Now you have sixty feet of fly line visibly marked. The idea is to get the thirty-foot mark in the tip section of your rod while holding the fly in your line hand by the bend of the hook. The rest of the line will be lying in the well of the boat or a stripping basket. When it’s time, make a roll cast that pulls the fly from between your fingers. Do not let the fly hit the water. Then, in one continuous motion, make a good, hard backcast. Shoot the line on the forward stroke but do not let the fly or line hit the water. I call this a “forward drift.” That should take at least the hash marks outside the rod tip, which means you’re now “holding” forty-five to fifty feet of line in the air. Make ONE more backcast, then come forward with your presentation and shoot the line that’s still on the deck. Casting sixty feet of fly line, plus the ten-foot leader, and with about seven feet of rod overhanging the boat’s gunwale means you just covered about eighty feet of water. If you can throw seventy or eighty feet of fly line, your odds of hooking a tarpon increase exponentially. Alas, try as he might, it just wasn’t happening on that morning in late May several years ago. “I just can’t perform. I can’t do it!” Ed wailed.” The fish are everywhere and I just can’t get the fly out to them.” Mea culpa! THE SECOND DEADLY SIN“I got this reel when uncle Joe died,” Gene said, “and I always wanted to try it out on a big fish. In his memory.” I turned around after setting the anchor and froze. “Uh, Gene, that reel isn’t the best thing for tarpon,” I said. Instantly, I flashed back nearly 30 years ago when my cousin Paul tried the same stunt on Chinook salmon in Michigan. He hooked a salmon and the reel literally exploded. It was an old—and I do mean old—Hasselback. The kind of reel that has a lever that you press to retrieve line. They were real popular with trout guides in Michigan back in the old days—when guides fished as much as their paying clients did. “These fish are pretty strong. Big, tough bruisers that could go a hundred pounds or more,” I said to Gene. “You’d really be better off with this Terry Hayden reel. Or this Billy Pate.” “Ah,” Gene said, “I really have my heart set of paying my respects to uncle Joe.” And so it was that a sixty-pound tarpon turned uncle Joes’ old automatic reel into shards of flying metal that reminded me of mortar fragments from long ago and far, far away. “Damn,” was all Gene could say afterward. Just “damn.” The moral here is obvious. Pay up for a reel that has a disc drag system capable of stopping big prehistoric fish that fear nothing other than a hammerhead shark. Yes, saltwater reels can get pretty spendy. But the alternative is wasting money on a cheap reel that probably will cost you the fish of a lifetime. Otherwise, the question you need to ask yourself—to paraphrase Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry—“Do you feel lucky?” Well, do you? THE THIRD DEADLY SINFly lines come in myriad configurations. Floating, sinking, sink-tip, high-density sinking and probably two or three other “specialty” lines I’ve either forgotten about or never bothered to investigate. The issue here involves cleanliness next to tarpon-less. Saltwater is NOT a lubricant. It will foul guides and lines with salt residue in just a day or two if you’re not diligent about hosing down the rod and reel. It’s also a very good idea to routinely clean the lines (floating, intermediate, and sink-tip are most commonly used) with a commercial line cleaner. I prefer the one sold by Royal Wulff, but there are plenty of brands on the market. Just remember to make the time after every outing to at least rinse down the rod/reel/line. Laziness or procrastination can get really expensive in the saltwater environment. Don’t forget for an instant that your ability to make that sixty-to-eighty-foot cast depends entirely on the line’s ability to flow smoothly through the guides. The Fourth Deadly SinLeaders and shock-tippet are the ultimate “parting” shot with any tarpon. Everything ultimately depends upon your leader-to-line connection and leader to shock tippet. Last summer one of my clients showed up at o-dark-thirty and pronounced “I’m ready to go, Cap’n! My gear’s rigged and rugged.” So, we headed north out of Casey Key toward Point ‘O Rocks. Twenty minutes later I shut down the four-stroke, put the Minn-Kota over the side and slowly walked into position. Easing the bow anchor into twenty-one feet of crystalline water, I set the slip-float and waited for the Hewes Redfisher to settle into a gentle rhythm on the calm Gulf seas. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s see whatcha got going here.” I was appalled. A skinny little thread of monofilament was nail-knotted to the fly line. The entire leader was about six feet long, and tapered to what looked like trout-caliber diameter. “Tactful,” I thought to myself. “Be tactful.” “So,” I finally said aloud. “Who rigged this up for you?” “The guy at the fly shop set it up when I bought the whole deal,” he said. Proudly. Wordlessly, I snipped off the leader and used an Albright knot to attach a three-foot section of fifty-pound butt, with a triple surgeon’s loop at the other end. I quickly threw a Bimini twist and triple surgeon’s into a section of thirty-pound, and then the same with a section of twenty-pound class tippet. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get a fly looped onto this tippet and start looking for meat.” It turned out to be one of those “God is kind to drunkards and fools” kind of days. Tarpon all over the place. Some popped up so close I thought they were going to eat the Hewes. I could have cut their throats with my knife. Jim jumped two that morning, but never really drove the hook home and they were off after a nice aerial display that would have made the Blue Angels proud. “What did I do wrong with those fish?” he asked as we no-waked our way home through the Venice Intracoastal Waterway. “It was the hook-set,” I told him. “Tarpon have jaws as tough as the side of this boat. You’ve really gotta bangbangbang that hook home. You were just too gentle.” “Okay,” he said. “And why did you completely re-rig my leader this morning?” I pulled a rod out from under the gunwale. “Look at how the fly line is lashed back over itself to form a loop,” I said, “then it’s also glued. That’s not going to strip the plastic off the Dacron core the way a nail knot would. “We use a loop-to-loop connection on the rest of the leader, and the Bimini twist is sorta like a shock absorber. All you had was straight mono, which stretches a little bit, but not nearly as effectively as a Bimini. Poorly tied knots—or the wrong ones—will cost you fish.” The Fifth Deadly Sin It’s called “fly fishing” for a reason. These creative assemblages of feathers, furs, rubber legs, and who knows what else, are what the sport ultimately is all about. Faking out a tarpon with some creative mixture that might resemble a minnow, crab, or shrimp really is something special. A lot of first-time tarpon anglers show up with flies as huge as the grins on their faces. Flies that would even intimidate a musky (if that’s possible). But way too big for tarpon. Crabs are a tarpon’s favorite food because of their high caloric value. Pass crabs. Blue crabs. It doesn’t matter. They can be as small as a quarter or as large as your hand. Put one in front of a tarpon’s eyes and his mouth will do the rest. The same for shrimp patterns. Everything in salt water grew up eating shrimp. And, of course, minnows of every shape, size and color. Tarpon are indiscriminate. They simply open that Hoover vacuum cleaner mouth and suck down everything in its path. The gill rakers will sort it all out afterwards. Generally speaking, smaller is better. At first light, a three-inch-long minnow imitation in black-and-purple, with just a touch of flash layered in between, is the Go To fly. Bunny-strip flies—again in black, black/purple, black-red--also are very effective, especially with sink-tip lines. As the gloam turns to dawn, the venerable Cockroach continues to entice tarpon, along with the crab and shrimp patterns. The sixth Deadly SinIn grouse hunting, it’s called “reaction and lead.” In tarpon fishing it’s called “don’t get mesmerized—MAKE THE CAST.” Actually seeing tarpon “on the fin” for the first time is like going to Disney World. Sort of “I never imagined it would be like this! Tarpon are everywhere!” The predictable result is that the novice tarpon angler stands on the casting deck in mute wonder. Meanwhile, a steady stream of tarpon well within shooting range are swimming past the boat. Now, you must understand that tarpon fishing is identical to deer hunting in one perspective. In both cases, you establish your “spot” on an expected travel lane and then you wait. Sometimes that gets boring. And sometimes all hell breaks loose. When all hell breaks loose, and there are dozens of tarpon gently rolling on top of the water—or lazily daisy-chaining—it’s easy to become transfixed. The problem, of course, is that by the time the reverie ends and the first cast is in the air, the fly invariably lands at the end with which the tarpon poops, rather than the end with which it eats. Enough said. “How do I manage it?” Mike Vallis asked last season. He’s from England, just south of London, and it was his first tarpon expedition. “I’m keen to catch something large,” he’d said in his email. “Not really interested in the smaller species.” I asked what he meant by “manage it.” “Well, getting the bait out in front. How soon do I cast? How far? That sort of thing.” “I’ll tell you when,” I told him. “Then immediately cast about 10 feet in front of the fish. You can’t imagine how big they are and how fast they swim during the time your cast is in the air.” We were anchored off Casey Key for about an hour when a nice pod came at us from the north. “Get set,” I said. “Now!” His cast was perfect and a tarpon in the hundred-pound class ate. Oh, boy! “How long,” Mike asked, gasping, “does it take to land one of these blokes?” “Well, the rough rule of thumb is a minute a pound. Of course, guys like Stu Apte and Lefty Kreh whip ‘em a lot faster. But they’ve caught hundreds of ‘em. Just settle down and keep doing what you’re doing.” Not long afterward came the sound every guide dreads. “SNAP” “Oh, my!” said Mike, as a piece of the rod tip started sliding down into the water. You can pretty much guess what went through my mind about that time. But I assure you it was a lot harsher than “Oh, My.” Anyway, we somehow managed to get the broken part of the tip back into the boat, and Mike held the pieces in place while I lashed them together with Surflon braided wire left over from Spanish mackerel season. Okay. Game On. A bit later I heard “Ooops, I believe we’ve come undone.” I quickly looked up at the rod and saw that the pieces were flopping around dangerously. I snipped a section of eighty-pound shock tippet from a fly on the console and cinched that tight, then re-tied the Surflon. All the while, this tarpon is giving us fits. It took another hour before Mike managed to bring that magnificent animal to the boat. “Rather a strong fight,” was about all Mike could manage as I spent the next thirty minutes reviving his great fish. Finally, with one last grand shudder of his body and flip of his tail, the tarpon was gone, I looked at Mike. “Time to go home?” “Yes, I’d rather think so.” Seventh Deadly SinNot listening to your guide!
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
