Tarpon Flies

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the oxygen rich, cool water.  You better pay close attention to details such as leader knots, backing knots and the durability of your reel.  Big tarpon can dismantle tackle. And they can wear you out physically.  Any tarpon of over a hundred pounds might take a couple hours to land. A tarpon over 150-ponds might take several hours.  Billy Pate's 188-pound record tarpon took him   

nine hours and 35-miles. When it finally came to the boat, it jerked the muscular 275-pound guide overboard into harms way. But that is the attraction.  Hunters that pursue large carnivores look for the same kind of experience.  If the game were easy, it might not have as much attraction. My largest tarpon landed was hooked in the early season off Big Pine Key, Florida. It wasn't big by tarpon standards. The estimate was 135-pounds. It took 2 1/2 hours of pulling my guts out before it finally gave up. To this date it is the largest fish of any kind that I have landed and it is indelibly etched in my mind.    

Tarpon are hard to see. Laid-up tarpon are the hardest. They look like black logs suspended lazily just below the choppy surface of the water.  You have to see them clearly before you cast.  There is only one end of a tarpon that will eat a fly.  The fly must be cast to exactly the right place in front of his face. Casting gets harder with adrenalin pumping through your veins, but adrenalin is the whole reason for the hunt in the first place. My first big tarpon took fly turning away with such force that the line burnt   groove

my hand.  I struck back a couple of times. Then the fish went berserk; rocketing its seven foot long body high into the air several times as the line melted off the reel.  There aren't words that can describe the helpless feeling. The twelve weight rod that felt like such a "stick" before I left Oregon now felt puny against such ferocious power.  After ten minutes and several more sky walking jumps, the hook which had been driven so deep into the flesh pulled free.  Twenty

a little smaller than the first fish.  Tarpon are able to gulp air into their swim bladders and absorb oxygen from  the atmosphere.  This action enables tarpon to live in oxygen 

starved water or supercharge themselves as they are being played on a hook and line.  The trick is to keep a fish from gulping by pulling its head down by sticking your rod under water and giving it a "down and dirty".  I wasn't able to keep my big tarpon from gulping and the fight went on for two and one half hours.  Finally my guide grabbed the tarpon by the lower jaw with both hands and hoisted it across the bow of the boat for a quick length measurement  and a picture.  It was 78"; easily the largest tarpon I had ever landed.   It was returned to the water where it revived  instantly.  I, however was exhausted. 

The Florida Keys fishery is so compelling that it has set the standard for tarpon fly development. Keys Style flies can be found here, and here. The flies that are current favorites with Florida guides, are Toads, Destroyers, Screamers and Alfs.

Baby Tarpon
Smaller tarpon like areas where fresh water or black water creeks flow from mangrove forests. There are many such places along the coast lines of Mexico and Belize. A typical day of baby tarpon fishing is chronicled here for instruction:

Along the coast of Campeche, Mexico, our guide, Juan poled the panga toward the mouth of the tiny black-water creek. Several small tarpon rolled with their dark backs and sharp dorsal fins showing above the surface of the dark water.  The pungent-sulfur smell of the mangrove swamp filled my nostrils.  The eight rod was loaded for the cast.  The red and white fly sailed through the air and landed with a quiet splat.  One strip, two strips...the water exploded as a tarpon felt the bite of steel.  It vaulted high into the air with it's gill-plates rattling.  The 30-pound leader broke and the fish was gone...that fast.  "Ten or eleven kilos", said Juan about the lost fish.  Then we examined the frayed leader.  I reached for my tackle bag and tied on a-foot of 40-pound

fluorocarbon for a bite tippet. My second fish came only a few minutes later, but threw the hook on the third jump. Five minutes later a small pod of tarpon showed themselves forty feet off the bow, and a third fish was hooked, and this time landed.  It probably weighed about ten pounds, which seems to be the average for the waters around Campeche.  During our five days of fishing Campeche, we never hooked a tarpon smaller than 5-pounds, although several were close.  We each hooked one fish that was larger than twenty-pounds.  Both were lost to leader breakage. 
Black Creek flows from the Belizian coast just north of Monkey River Town. If you don't know where it is, you will never find it. The opening to the ocean is so small  and shallow that it is easily missed in the jagged wall of giant mangroves.  One morning Patty, Mark Stensland, Derek Mushchamp and I entered Black Creek in the gloomy dawn. After the tiny opening, the creek opens up and several hundred yards inland it becomes a black water lagoon covering about ten acres. A half a dozen tiny creeks flow gently from the mangroves at the head end of the lagoon. It is a primordial place completely walled in by thirty foot tall mangroves. It is an oily black, sulfur smelling lake completely cut off from the rest of the world.  For some reason small tarpon often congregate here in large numbers. This morning was no exception. Patty, Stens and I jumped a dozen tarpon between eight and thirty pounds in a couple of hours. Then the sun climbed over the top of the mangroves. The black water and the dead calm air turned our little piece of paradise into and oven.  Short jacket flies, a blood sucking nuisance of the Central American tropics began to target our sweating skins. Stens, who is a light blond of Norwegian descent applied a liberal layer of sun screen. On top of that was applied a slathering of insect repellent. Unknowingly he had just created one of the finest lubricants ever produced by man. A tarpon rolled to the surface of the black water seventy feet from the boat. Stens grabbed his favorite baby tarpon gun, a sage RPLX with his cherished shiny black Abel number-2 Big Game reel.  His cast landed the orange grizzly fly in the rings of the rise and he began stripping the fly back to the boat. Nearly thirty feet of line were retrieved before the tarpon took the fly. The strike was so savage that the rod handle slipped from Sten's slippery hand and the only contact with the fish was the line in his stripping hand.  The rod shot twenty feet from the boat and bounce around on the water as the fish jumped repeatedly. A string of four letter words filled the quiet air and the other three of us were laughing so hard that we were no help. The thirty pound tarpon was finally hand-lined to the boat, the rod was recovered and the fish's picture hangs on the ceiling beam of our shop.
Another adventure with Derrick Muschamp took us deep into the Belizian jungle. His friend Frankie, had told us about a tarpon lagoon at the head end of Boom Creek a tiny black water tributary of the Sittee River. We used Derrick's skiff, and for several miles the creek was so narrow there was no place to turn around, and as we had jumped the boat over several party sumerged logs that spanned the creek, there was no way to back out.  We were getting very nervous that we had marooned ourselves when the creek opened into a beautiful lagoon ringed with tall mangroves intertwined with vines ladened with huge sweet smelling trumpet shaped flowers. Here tiny trout- sized tarpon from 18" to 22" ate an epoxy headed fly we dubbed the Boom Creek Special. It was Patty's turn to be the big winner. She even landed a tarpon that took the fly on a low back-cast.
One November found us in Naples Florida, fishing with Captain Bob Marvin at night. Naples is cut up with dredged canals and water front trophy houses with lighted private docks. some dock lights are of sufficient intensity that they attract schools of bait fish and the predatory fish that come to harvest them, such as jack crevelle, snook and tarpon. Bob, Patty and I were stationed off just such a dock with our navigation lights turn off. We are invisible in the darkness and it was my turn on the bow. A man and women inside the house were clearly visible through their huge plate glass window. They were clearly unaware we were watching. A tarpon rolled under their dock. My cast fell true and the fifteen pound fish was landed in as many minutes. As I released the tarpon, the man in the house raised his martini to his lips as if to toast my accomplishment. I toasted him back with a bottle of Gatoraide.

The same flies that work for adult tarpon seem to work fine for baby tarpon as well. Old favorites like the Cockroach, Orange Grizzly and Boom Creek Special are consistent producers as well as new patterns like the Tarpon Screamer.  White flies with pearl flash and a little bit of red or hot pink seem to be most productive as well.