Don and Sally were fifteen minutes late. I wasn’t annoyed by this, my anglers show up late all
the time, but I found it kind of surprising since I knew how eager Don and his
wife were for their trip. We were going
after tarpon this morning and the conditions were perfect. We had a cloudless sky, no wind and a tide
that just started rising a half hour earlier.
It was the complete opposite of the morning we had just a
month earlier. Our first charter together
happened right after a nasty March cold front with twenty knot winds and
churned up flats that made sight casting almost impossible. I fought a constant battle to keep the skiff
in a decent casting position and Don still managed to land a nice legal-sized
redfish on a fly early that morning.
Sally followed up with one of her own on spinning gear just before
lunch.
They were the first new clients I’d fished with in a long time
and we were off to a good start. They
were also that perfect combination of skilled anglers who were easy to deal with
on a tough day, so I was more than happy when Don started talking about booking
a tarpon trip with me in early April.
Over the next three weeks I fielded nearly a dozen phone
calls and e-mails from Don about flies, fly lines, leaders, and hook
sizes. Believe it or not, I actually
like getting calls at dinnertime from my clients asking me questions such as
“Should I use rabbit fur or marabou in these Tarpon Toads I’m tying?” I take that as a sign of a serious angler,
and Don was definitely serious.
That’s why I found his slight tardiness that morning kind of
puzzling, but he and Sally were willing to drive all the up from Estero to fish
with me again so I let it slide. It was
still a few minutes before 8AM when we finally motored away from the dock. There was still plenty of morning left for us.
Matlacha Pass was flat calm and the run to Charlotte Harbor
took no time at all. The water up there
was gin clear and 76 degrees, perfect conditions to find some big tarpon. I aimed my Beavertail skiff west and we
pressed on until the shoreline of Gasparilla came into view. A few minutes later we were approaching the
shallows of my favorite tarpon spot.
Just as I was reaching for the throttle I noticed the other boat coming
from the west but aiming for the same bank.
He came off plane first and idled right up to the edge of the flat. There was a lone angler driving the boat, a
very expensive looking Hell’s Bay, and he immediately jumped up to the bow with
a fly rod and started his trolling motor.
Now I was annoyed.
Someone had beaten me to my spot by less than a minute and was in
position to get the first shots at every tarpon running down the flat. If Don and Sally had been on time we would
have been well in front of this guy. I
grumbled a bit but there was nothing to be done about it. I decided to just drop my Power Pole and let
the other skiff move down the flat, silently praying that I wouldn’t witness
him hook a tarpon right in front of us.
I had Don step on the bow and make some practice casts until
the Hell’s Bay was far enough away from me.
After several minutes I picked up the anchor and started poling my
Beavertail across the three foot deep sandy bottom. I kept an eye on the other boat but just a
few minutes later the angler stepped off the deck and slowly motored off the
flat without making a single cast. I was
glad to have the stretch of water to myself but was now worried that the other
angler left because no tarpon were here.
It was now after 9AM and the sun was hitting the water at a
perfect angle. I could see everything
within 200 yards of us and a big tarpon would be as obvious as the nose on my
face. I could also see the top of the
Boca Grande lighthouse straight to my west.
There would be hundreds, maybe thousands of tarpon pouring through the famous
pass that morning. There would also be
dozens of big center console boats drifting and motoring through the mile wide
cut slinging live bait and heavy jigs at the mass of fish rolling in the deep
water off Gasparilla.
Boca Grande Pass was only a few minutes away but it was the
far side of the moon as far as I was concerned.
The full contact style of fishing they do out there is the polar
opposite of the way I chase tarpon. I would
rather get one jump on a fly rod than muscle in a dozen fish out of the depths
on big conventional reels. But the way
the flat seemed this morning, getting Don that one jump was looking doubtful.
I quietly cursed at myself over the next few minutes for not
insisting we leave a half hour earlier, convinced we already missed our short
window at a tarpon. These fish are often
a sunrise deal and it was now almost 9:30.
That’s when I saw the black spot in the water quickly moving towards
us.
I spun the boat with the push pole as fast as I could to
give Don a downwind shot. The fish didn’t
like the sudden motion and made a quick left turn off the bright sand and into
the darker grass, giving Don a lousy angle but I had him Hail Mary a cast
straight off the bow to where I thought the tarpon might be heading. The purple fly became invisible once it hit
the dark water and our one shot looked finished. I was just about to have Don try one more
throw when the slack line from his rod tip snapped tight like a snare.
We never saw the fish eat the fly but we all witnessed the
aftermath. Six feet and more than one
hundred pounds of brilliant silver tarpon came rocketing from the surface just
twenty feet from my bow. The huge fish
seemed to freeze for a moment in the air, completely out of the water and in
that perfect mouth open, gills flared pose that every taxidermist loves. From the poling platform at the back of my skiff
I had a fantastic view of the sparkling tarpon and several bucket’s full of
spray flying through the air, with Don locked on to his heavily bowed fly rod
just below me. It’s a sight I’ve
witnessed countless times and still never get to see enough.
The tarpon smashed back into the water a heartbeat later and
it was all done. Without seeing the fish
eat the fly, Don never had a chance to set the hook with the necessary violence
that tarpon require. Sally was poised
between us with the camera ready to capture a second jump that wasn’t going to
happen. The fish disappeared as quickly
as it arrived.
It was our only hookup of the day. We moved on to other flats and cast to dozens
of other fish but none would play our game.
I wasn’t really disappointed. It
was early April and tarpon season was just beginning. This time of year I often hook these fish
through a combination of blind luck and being in the right place at the right
time. I thought about that as we ran
home at lunchtime. We were definitely in
the right place that morning. And we
were there at the right time because Don and Sally were fifteen minutes
late.
