HERE ONE DAY, GONE THE NEXT

By Nick Carter

Just after daybreak, we bobbed in an anchored skiff looking out over a wide, shallow bay. Capt. Scott Burgess sat on the poling platform smoking a cigar and drinking coffee. Jesse Trevathan stood on the casting deck. He wasn’t casting. With line stripped out into the decal-littered stripping bucket in front of him, he held his fly—a locally tied (FC)2 Renegade—in his left hand and his rod in his right. He just watched. We all watched, eyes focused on a large patch of sand off the bow that stood out from the grassy bottom around it.

We were looking for tarpon cruising the shallows on their annual westward migration along the Gulf Coast. In this sweet spot on Florida’s Forgotten Coast, they show up in May and are gone by August. The action peaks in June and July, and their massive silver bodies would show clearly in contrast to the sandy bottom.

“They follow paths, the same paths, year after year,” said Burgess. “It’s based on the topography of the bottom as they move in with the tide.”

He had positioned the boat with the bow facing a ridge that rose from 7 feet up to 3 feet deep. When tarpon move in, the tops of such ridges are too shallow for them to cross. The big fish are channeled into the shallows in search of pogies, crabs and other delicacies.

With the trap set, there was nothing to do but wait and talk. Trevathan said tarpon spawn on the new and full moons of summer. For days they evacuate the flats and head offshore.

“I’ve been out here right before the full moon, and I literally saw hundreds of tarpon. They were doing nothing but chasing tail. They were daisy chaining all over the place,” Trevathan said. “I went back on the moon, and they were gone.”

The daisy chaining Trevathan mentioned, in which fish group up and swim in circles nose to tail, is thought by some to be pre-spawn behavior, a sort of courtship dance. But no spawning takes place during these events. For the most part, scientists don’t really know why tarpon do what they do.

Trevathan and Burgess both have their theories about the movements of these giants. What they know for sure is tarpon show up each summer on the flats and in the passes. Clean water is needed to see them. Seeing them is necessary to present the fly. The cast must lead them, but not too much, and the retrieve must intercept the fish at the right angle to incite a strike.

If the fish eats, it takes a hard strip set to drive the hook into a tarpon’s bony mouth. How hard? “As hard as you can,” said Burgess. Even if all goes according to plan, Burgess admitted there’s a less than 50 percent chance of steering a large tarpon boat-side. The power and aerial display of a hooked tarpon are legendary. Sadly, we did not witness it that day.

As the tide turned, the murky water became more dingy. Late in the morning, the call was made to move in search of redfish.

A week later, Burgess sent a text message with an attached photo. It showed a big tarpon, which he estimated to be 135 to 140 pounds, tail-thrashing the water just off the tip of his 12-weight rod, which was broken in half.

“40 min fight with a broken rod… she pulled me 2 miles from my anchor,” the text read.