15 minute read
What's Old is New Again
The combination of fishing knowledge and scientific research shows that a regional approach is needed for tarpon management.
BY T. EDWARD NICKENS
Mum was the word. No one catching tarpon in North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound in the 1970s was giving up the goods, and that’s how it stayed so good for so long. That’s how you could go out like Owen Lupton did, and hook 40 tarpon in a day. That’s how you could land 13 solid fish—40 to 80 to 100-plus pounds—in a blistering hot 4-hour stretch of a Tar Heel August, running from rod to rod, yanking pinfish and skates off the hooks so the tarpon could have a crack at the cut bait. Capt. Rick Caton, who today runs Free Agent out of Hatteras, won’t ever forget that day. He won’t ever forget those few years when Pamlico Sound was an unknown tarpon mecca. “You could go out on any slick calm hot summer day and see tarpon rolling in 360 degrees,” he says. “And I’m not talking about hundreds of tarpon. Thousands of tarpon.”
But there was a code. Keep your mouth shut when you could. Lie through your teeth when you had to. On Lupton’s boat, there was also a plan: If another boat showed up while he was tarpo fishing, he put the big rod down while his children jumped up on the bow to make a show of casting for dink fish. It was the same in Virginia, in the open Chesapeake Bay and along the seaside of the lower Delmarva Peninsula. Ditto in South Carolina’s Winyah Bay and Santee Delta, and in the ocean off the Golden Isles of Georgia. At the time, no one knew precisely where they came from, or how they got there, but significant populations of tarpon showed up in very catchable numbers each summer, far from the more southerly latitudes typically considered their home turf.
In the public’s perception, tarpon and tarpon fishing have long been closely associated with Florida’s clear water and subtropical climes, the waters of the Gulf Coast, or more exotic locales in the Caribbean. But among a subculture of serious practitioners in the Mid-Atlantic and upper South—from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia’s saltmarsh-lined coast—tarpon fishing in those waters could be as good as nearly anywhere else in the world. You just had to know the fish were there, mainly during the swelter of summer, and how to catch them in turbid waters that could seem featureless to the ordinary angler. And many of those early tarpon pioneers are still working today to advocate for better management of tarpon populations and the habitats on which they rely.
Those glory days existed in a sort of fishing fantasyland that was wedged between two technological revolutions: The advent of sportfishing gear tough enough to tame tarpon. And the advent of social media, whose addictive emphasis on the where and the who changed the fishing landscape forever. But today’s tarpon anglers are living through another kind of technological revolution: The dramatic and paradigm-changing revelations of new scientific studies on the life history of tarpon in the southern United States. Bolstered by the scientific expertise and funding from Bonefish & Tarpon Trust and its partners, projects such as the Tarpon Acoustic Tagging Project are helping to rewire approaches to conserving the Silver King. Study results are revealing the outlines of an adult tarpon migration along the southeastern U.S. coast that is split into two sub-groups. In their spawning season, mature fish mix in the Florida Keys. Then one cluster migrates north along the eastern U.S. coast, while another moves along the Gulf of Mexico shore to as far west as the Mississippi Delta. And emerging data from an ongoing study that received BTT funding points to a third subgroup that migrates along the Gulf Coast, spanning from the Delta through Mexico.
That tarpon are found in such distant regions is no surprise to the coterie of anglers who helped pioneer tarpon angling in what many then considered far-off waters. These fish have always bedeviled and bewitched those silver-struck with their pursuit. Connecting the dots of their incredible migrations—and to the tarpon fishing of yore—should only bolster arguments for the need for comprehensive conservation action targeting water quality and tarpon habitat, and a regional approach to managing a fishery that has long been a part of angling culture far beyond its core territory.
EARLY EFFORTS
It’s not that tarpon were unknown in the land of whole hog barbecue. Perhaps the first tarpon caught in Virginia waters was landed in 1936, north of Chincoteague and not far from the Maryland border, by a couple of red drum anglers who reportedly fought the fish for two-and-a-half hours. But that was an incidental catch; most observers posit that the first tarpon caught intentionally in Virginia was landed by Claude Rogers, the state’s saltwater tournament director, in July of 1955. In 1974, angler Barry Truitt, chief conservationist for The Nature Conservancy’s Virginia Coast Reserve, hauled in the 130-pound state record.
Kendall Osborne knew all about this. Whispered tales of Virginia tarpon fishing drew him to the region in 2005, where he befriended the long-time outdoor editor for The Virginian-Pilot, Bob “Hutch” Hutchinson. Hutchinson was a tarpon fanatic; in fact, he’d been handling the boat when Rogers landed his 1955 fish. When Osborne arrived on the scene, he made a promise to himself: He was going to catch a tarpon on fly in Virginia waters no matter how long it took.
It took three long years. Virginian anglers were simpatico with tarpon nuts just to the south: The ones that knew how to catch the here-today-gone-today fish weren’t talking. “I never got a pinch of help from anyone,” Osborne recalls. “I learned everything by myself, because I didn’t want to ask anybody. And most people would not help you, anyway. All Hutch would say was that the tarpon were everywhere and nowhere, which was pretty accurate.”
During Osborne’s first year of his tarpon-by-fly quest, he never even saw a fish until his very last day on the water, in September. He started at the same spot the next July, and skunked that summer, as well. But in 2008 he struck silver, leadering a tarpon to the side of his 13-foot Boston Whaler. He thinks he was the fifth person to catch a tarpon on fly in Virginia waters.
Tarpon fishing in Virginia is no secret today, of course, but it hasn’t gotten any easier. There’s the usual chorus of increasing angling pressure, but one of the current challenges to tarpon fishing in Virginia, oddly enough, is the state’s impressively successful seagrass restoration program. Beginning in 1999, seaside bays along the southern Virginia coast have been seeded with eelgrass, which had long carpeted the region in vast underwater meadows but had nearly disappeared. Today, some 10,000 acres of lush eelgrass have spread, comprising the largest seagrass restoration in the world. It's awesome habitat for tarpon, but the eelgrass beds complicate the act of putting one of these fish on a hook even more. “Between the grass and the heat and the bugs and the sharks and the stingrays,” says Truitt, “you have to have fortitude and patience.”
PAMLICO PIONEERS
In North Carolina, Owen Lupton and Rick Caton had grit and gumption in spades. Credited with catching the first targeted tarpon in North Carolina waters, theirs was an intriguing partnership. The year was 1976, and Lupton was teaching a twoyear vocational course in commercial fishing at Pamlico County High School. The school owned its own trawler, which Lupton captained as he took students out on Pamlico Sound for shrimp and crab trawling instruction. But on Fridays, weekends, and during the summer, he fished the Miss PCHS with a few prized students to help pay for the program. Caton, a skinny kid with the nickname “Skeletor,” shared Lupton’s fascination with tarpon, and the pair would watch giant tarpon rolling by the boat, refusing to eat anything. “You could have hit them with a flounder gig,” Caton recalls, “but you couldn’t catch them.” When the pair hooked and lost a few tarpon fishing small croakers deep, they realized that bait was the key. They made a pact to catch a tarpon in waters where the old-timers said it couldn’t be done.
On the first day of their quest, they hooked a 15-pound bluefish that jumped clear of the water, and the pair howled with glee, thinking it was a tarpon. It wasn’t, but the very next fish was. The tarpon hit a cut croaker on a J-hook rigged with a long leader, on a Shimano TLD 15 reel. The pair fought the 90-pound fish for a half-hour before getting it to the boat. There was another boat about 300 yards away, witnessing the fight, and as Lupton and Caton landed the tarpon the fellow motored over to see what the commotion was all about. “I hollered out: Sir, this is the first tarpon fished for and caught in Pamlico Sound!” Caton laughs. “You have seen history being made!
“We were just a little bit excited.”
Caton and his clients have landed unknown numbers of tarpon in North Carolina waters since. One day he leadered 10 to the boat. On another day, he landed five while fishing alone. “By the time I got to bed that night,” he laughs, “didn’t nobody have to put me to sleep.”
Of all those tarpon, he’s only brought that first one back to the docks. “And only then,” he says, “because nobody would have believed us if we didn’t have the fish.”
And that first North Carolina fish isn’t the only Tar Heel tarpon to make history. Twenty years later, deep in the night of May 31, 1996, a Cuban angler off the waterfront of Havana landed a 70-pound tarpon using a hand line, and floating in a tire inner tube with a seat made of rope. As he was cutting up the fish to sell, he found a tag, which he mailed to the listed Miami address. The fish had been caught and tagged 22 months earlier in Pamlico Sound, during the 2nd Annual Oriental Rotary Tarpon Tournament. The tarpon had traveled more than 800 nautical miles. To this day, it remains one of only three tarpon documented to have crossed the Florida Strait to Cuba—two tarpon tagged in North Carolina, and one tagged in Boca Grande, Florida.
CONSERVATION EVOLUTION
No one is any longer questioning the catchability, much less the presence, of tarpon in these more northerly enclaves. The jetties off Charleston Harbor were a known tarpon hotspot since the 1950s, when anglers pulling Cisco Kid trolling plugs found willing fish stacked up along the rocks. Guide Fuzzy Davis began targeting Palmetto State fish in the early 1980s, soaking menhaden, mullet, and croakers. He led client Steve Kiser to the current state record in 1987, a 154-pound, 10-ounce brute caught off Hilton Head.
That growing fishery led South Carolina guides and conservationists to lobby for protective measures. BTT founding member Fred Allen and Lowcountry guides Captains Steve Roff and Hunter Allen were instrumental in building support for the effort. In June of 2013, just as tarpon were working their way into South Carolina waters, the state passed a law limiting the take of tarpon to a single fish per day that measured 77 inches or greater in fork length. The statute’s strategy was to ensure that only fish likely to surpass the state record could be kept. The law was similar to Florida’s stricture making tarpon catch-and-release-only unless the angler holds a tarpon tag to be used in pursuit of an IGFA world record.
Conservation initiatives aimed at protecting tarpon in these shoulder states evolved on differing timelines. South Carolina’s positive effort was followed in 2021 by North Carolina, which moved to make tarpon a catch-and-release only fishery. Previously, a single tarpon could be kept each day, but the state’s vibrant pier-fishing culture presented a conundrum: Hauling a heavy tarpon up to a pier railing nearly guaranteed its death. In Georgia, where the state’s Golden Isles region has long been known as a tarpon hotspot, tarpon harvest is limited to a single fish over 68 inches per day, in line with other states that allow an angler to vie for a record fish.
Unfortunately, Virginia remains a conspicuous outlier; there are no regulations governing tarpon harvest. “None,” underscores Osborne, bitterly. “They’re not even designated as a gamefish. You can shoot them with a speargun, with a bow and arrow, whatever. The attitude is, Well, if we’ve gotten along without a regulation this far, we don’t need one. Fortunately, the catch-and-release ethic for tarpon is now nearly universal.”
Which is to be applauded. But as more anglers target tarpon in more places, a significant challenge in these maturing fisheries is how to minimize the impacts of increasing fishing pressure even when fish are released. The Florida Keys and other more southerly regions benefit from long traditions of careful handling, both regulated, such as size and gear restrictions, and voluntary, among them Florida’s ban on lifting tarpon over 40 inches from the water unless the angler is pursuing a state or world record and has a permission tag to do so.
In these emerging fisheries, says Dr. Aaron Adams, BTT’s Director of Science and Conservation, “there may not be as much knowledge about best handling practices such as keeping the fight short, avoiding dragging fish up on a beach, and using circle hooks. That’s part of the learning process as these fisheries evolve.” To help guide the establishment of such conservation-friendly traditions, BTT and others are dialing up education efforts. In Georgia, for example, BTT worked with the Coastal Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources in 2022 on a collaborative effort to educate anglers about best handling practices for tarpon. As part of the campaign, every licensed charter captain in the state received a newly designed boat towel emblazoned at the top with “Tarpon Tips” for safer handling.
But better handling practices and conservative harvest can cushion tarpon populations only so much. There’s a growing understanding that tarpon will need more than fishing regulations to persist: Just as conservationists have long recognized that waterfowl and other migrating birds need critical habitats all along their migratory routes—breeding habitats, wintering habitats, stopover habitats where they can feed quickly and efficiently during their arduous flights—tarpon need a wide range of healthy habitats along their own movements. They’ll need management of forage such as menhaden to ensure they have enough gas in the tank to fuel migration and support spawning. Everywhere, from shallow saltmarsh bays to open ocean corridors, they’ll need clean water no less than humans need clean air. And to the extent that increased fishing opportunity for tarpon is rooted in migration patterns shifting in a changing climate, tarpon will need new constituencies advocating for regionwide management approaches.
"All these things are interacting," says Adams. "And those interactions underscore the connectivity between the oceans and the coastlines, between wetlands and rivers and tidal creeks, across the entire region. Issues of water quality and quantity and freshwater flow alterations due to development will matter across the broader landscape, because we now know that all of these habitats are so important. We're even seeing tarpon larvae and juvenile fish in duck impoundments way up into the South Carolina Lowcountry. It's all a new frontier."
A few things haven't changed, of course. Tarpon still inspire a few crazy antics by anglers. Mum might still be the word when it comes to holding a favorite fishing spot close to the chest. But this much is coming into focus: When it comes to tarpon along the southern U.S. coast, it turns out that what's mine is yours, and vice versa. We're all in similar thrall to this majestic fish. And we all share responsibility for conserving a species whose epic life history is only growing more fascinating by the day.
An award-winning author and journalist, T. Edward Nickens is editor-at-large of Field & Stream and a contributing editor for Garden & Gun and Audubon magazine.
