June is here and this is a month that’s usually all about
tarpon, tarpon, and more tarpon. It’s
true that the silver king holds the top spot with most Pine Island anglers
right now but there’s another powerful and acrobatic predator all over the
flats this month that’s equally worth pursuing:
the black tip shark.
I’ve always thought black tips as tarpon with teeth. That’s because they have a tendency to launch
themselves into the air as soon as they feel the hook. They can also peel off yard after yard of
line in the blink of an eye. The last
fish that actually spooled me was a 50 pound black tip that emptied 250 yards
of mono while I was trying to pull my anchor in a deep Key West channel. An Olympic sprinter would have been
embarrassed by how quickly that shark made off with all of my line.
As an added bonus, black tips are one of the few species of
shark that will readily attack a fly. An
incredible sense of smell but weak eyesight is a characteristic of most sharks. Unfortunately this makes convincing them to
eat a scentless hunk of feathers a real trick.
Black tips have a powerful nose but they also attack their prey on
purely visual cues. Spin fishermen catch
them all the time on plugs and lures and a large, flashy fly pattern will
usually work just as well. Color,
however, is very important when you’re tying shark flies and ironically a very
bright, life jacket orange works better than anything else. Twenty pound test fluorocarbon and six inches
of light Malin wire is all you’ll need for a bite tippet.
While black tips and many other species are common in the
shallows right now, getting a good cast at one can be more difficult than most
people think. Black tips are especially
wary around boats but a good amount of chum in the water can get them into
attack mode. For this I really like to
use a small jack which I’ll butterfly and hang off the bow. Ladyfish work just as well, too. Then I just drop the Power Pole and
wait. If I don’t see a fin within half
an hour I’ll start drifting with the current.
The long sandbars in Charlotte Harbor are a perfect area to
set up a chum line for sharks. The water
is especially clear up there and you’ll almost always find a decent
current. Once a shark is spotted homing
in on the scent it’s important to cast well ahead of its path and get the fly
moving. Black tips seem especially
turned on by motion and will be drawn toward a pulsing orange pattern just
under the surface. If they charge the
fly it’s important to continue to strip even after the hook disappears under
the shark’s nose since their mouth is set further back and the actual take is
not always visible. Just like with
tarpon, you’ll need to strike them hard with your line hand to make sure the
hook penetrates and holds. Any shark’s
mouth is as tough as leather and designed to take a lot of punishment when
their prey decides to fight back before getting swallowed.
Once the fly is stuck keep treating them like tarpon. Get the slack line on the reel quickly and
bow to them when the shark jumps. Black
tips will test the drag of any reel so let them do their thing for the first
few minutes before getting too aggressive.
Once they settle down you can pressure them hard and even a full grown
black tip can be landed in less than thirty minutes. After you have the shark boat side, be sure
to release them unharmed. Some people
think black tips are decent eating but I hate seeing them killed for any
reason. There are so many better tasting
fish out there and almost every shark species has been terribly
overfished. Let them all go to fight
another day.
Sharks will never replace tarpon as a glamour species,
especially with the fly fishing community, but the beautiful and acrobatic
black tips deserve a lot more attention than they get.
