“I reckon I can break a big tarpon’s will on the strike” (you can’t!) - the world’s most perfect sport fish?
I’m going to assume that if you are reading this blog that firstly you are an angler, and secondly that this lockdown is causing you to think about all things fishing even more than you do already. I’ve already spent most of my time thinking about all things bass fishing, and the other day I got to thinking about a certain conundrum upon which I like to return to in my head from time to time - what is the most perfect sporting fish in the world? And because of my own personal choice here I thought I’d tell you about a particular early morning in the Florida Keys when I got my backside handed to me on a plate……………
What is a sport or sporting fish? I guess that any fish we can actively catch on lure, fly or bait is a sport fish, but I would suggest that certain species of fish arguably provide more “sport” than others. Perhaps they grow bigger or they pull particularly hard. Perhaps where we might catch them are particularly special areas or sight fishing and so on might be involved. I can think of any number of different fish that I have either caught or seen or read about which I reckon are proper sport fish - our bass, striped bass, bonefish, GTs, tarpon, jacks, golden dorado, wild trout, steelhead, Atlantic and Pacific salmon, snook, sharks, marlin, tuna, sailfish, dorado, king mackerel, wahoo, redfish, and so on and so on, but what is the world’s most perfect sport fish? My answer is tarpon, and these are my main reasons why:
They are insanely powerful
They get properly big
They are amazing to catch at all sizes on balanced tackle
They take lures, flies and bait so they appeal to all kinds of anglers
They can be caught in very good numbers from some very accessible and not very expensive to access parts of the world
They are very prolific in season
They are meant to be rubbish to eat and generally don’t get commercially hammered
They are a migratory species and you can often target where to chase them depending on when and how you want to fish for them, the sort of size of tarpon you are most interested in, etc.
They are an inshore species and you don’t need to troll for them at all (I seriously can’t take any form of trolling, I would rather not go fishing than have to troll, it bores me to tears)
You can catch them from (inshore) boat, shore, beach, pier, estuary, flats, jungle lajes, you name it, tarpon can be caught there
I have been lucky enough to have caught a number of tarpon over the years and I can still remember the first one I hooked and landed like it was yesterday. I had gone to the Florida Keys for my first time to shoot a load of photos for my first fishing book, and I was with a lad called Graeme Pullen and his group of anglers. Holy cow can that guy fish! He asked me if I would like a crack at tarpon one night and I said yes please but I was pretty convinced that surely these overgrown herrings couldn’t be as awesome as everybody said they were. How wrong I was. I remember we were drifting live pinfish under floats at night from a rental boat and suddenly my rod slams over as something unseen proceeds to try and rip it from my hands and then there’s the most almighty bloody splash as said unseen fish leaps out of the water somewhere in the inky blackness and here I am, hooked up to my first ever tarpon, and after a seriously intense and knackering tussle I eventually manage to bring what was well over 100lbs of fish to the side of the boat for unhooking. Tarpon are every single thing they are cracked up to be and more.
I have watched the biggest tarpon I can recall seeing rolling in the Cuanza river south of Luanda in Angola - we were not remotely geared up to have a go at them - and I have hooked and lost a couple of tarpon from the shore when I was on a photo job out in Venezuela. My day’s work had finished and I thought it would be a good idea to chuck some lures at these big tarpon rolling off a pier out in Los Roques - it wasn’t! My baitcasting reel was emptied so quickly one evening I don’t think I had quite registered the fact I was even momentarily hooked up before the tarpon jumped and was gone. As far as I can remember all the tarpon I have hooked and then landed have been from the boat in the Florida Keys, and when those tarpon are running there are serious numbers of fish and they get really big as well.
And I came up with one hell of a plan one early morning as we were drifting live crab around and through one of the road bridges near Marathon with my mate Rodney who used to run such a brilliant operation out there. I said to Rodney something along the lines of: “Rodney, I reckon I can break a tarpon’s will on the strike”. I had done a lot of shark fishing off the beaches in Namibia by then and just occasionally you could land one of the bronzies (bronze whaler sharks) very quickly if you gave it serious, serious gears and managed to disrupt that first long run they often like to do. Could I hit a tarpon so bloody hard on the strike that I could literally break its will and as good as reel it straight in? Tarpon go and go and go and they also regularly come to the surface to gulp air which seems to give them even more stamina and sometimes you are almost willing the fight to be over because they can pull so bloody hard.
Now it’s fairly obvious that my plan was flawed from the start because I’m convinced that “breaking a tarpon’s will on the strike” might have become an established tactic for these mighty sporting fish if it had been found to work. Anglers have been sport fishing for tarpon many, many years before Henry here turns up to do battle with them, but had I perhaps stumbled upon a method of beating a 100lb+ silver scaled, turbo charged express train into almost instant submission? Would Henry Gilbey find himself the talk of the tarpon fishing world because his amazing new idea has only gone and worked? That particular morning we were going to find out…………….
If you read any international fishing magazines then you might have noticed that my name has never appeared amongst tarpon fishing pioneers, and this is down to the simple fact that my idea failed about as spectacularly as possible that warm spring morning in the Florida Keys. My live crab got nailed, I pointed the rod to the fish and let it properly take the bait, I whacked the reel into gear, everything went very, very tight on a locked down drag, and as it did I smacked seven bells of hell out of the tarpon again and again and again. And then I did it again for good measure. Perhaps 150lbs of writhing silver muscle leapt clean out of the water in the early dawn light and I hit the fish again just to make sure the tarpon knew who the bossman was here. This was it, I was going to break this mighty fish’s will on the strike alone…………..
And then what sounded like a rifle shot cracked through the humid air as my line snapped and I was left standing at the side of the boat and kinda hoping that perhaps the other guys hadn’t seen what just happened. In one small moment of seriously crap angling I had failed about as badly as it’s possible to do in fishing. Big tarpon are very obviously way too mighty for some eejut from the UK to try and overcome on the strike alone. With egg dripping from my face I wound the slack line back onto my reel, unwound the drag back from solid, peered up from beneath my baseball cap and said “er, Rodney, I don’t think that method works. Please can I have another hook?”