Their flesh is unattractive and bony and the fish is always released after a classic battle however the tarpon fishing in Key West is world respected. Apr to June are the prime months for tarpon fishing though there are usually some dawdlers around at any point between mid-February and July.
Called the “Silver King”, these fish can grow to over 200 lbs though a one hundred pound tarpon is still an unusual fish. Though it may be possible to hunt the tarpon with a fly rod aboard a flats boat, almost all of the Key West tarpon fishing is done by “chumming” with tiny dead fish that are caught by the shrimp boats. The skipper will cut up these little fish into even smaller pieces and throw them just behind the boat.
By ceaselessly doing this ( chumming ), the tarpon are drawn to the provision of food and can often be seen flashing and rolling right behind the ship as they eat the chum.
Then it’s simply a case of hooking one of the bait fish onto a large circle hook and letting it drift down behind your boat. Basically it’s not as straightforward as that, the art is to make your bait run at precisely the same speed as the chum being thrown in and in detecting a bite when it comes along. Anyway it’s great fun and on a good day you can simply hook ten or more tarpon though you’d be terribly fortunate to land them all. We are generally using mainline between fifteen and thirty lb breaking strain with a fifty or sixty lb fluorocarbon leader when fishing this style. Fighting a tarpon is both exhausting and enthralling. Those fish just do not know when to give up.
Typically when you are fighting any other fish and it comes and gasps a mouthful of air you know that you have won, when a tarpon grabs a mouthful of air it is able to take the oxygen from it and it carries on battling with replenished vigor. One of my fishing chums tells a story about a first-timer who hooked his first tarpon. The fish jumped and the angler exclaimed “wow how gigantic is that” to that the skipper responded “about forty five minutes”. It is not weird for a tarpon to battle for an hour, and for the fish to be landed many miles from where it was originally hooked.
Add to this the chance of playing your fish under the watchful gawk of lots of holidaymakers aboard a cruise ship and you get something of the flavour of Key West Tarpon fishing.
Even the windiest of days will not stop the tarpon fishing, although a cold front that drops the water temperature all of a sudden might put them off the feed for a day or 2. Whatever you do on your trip to Key West, ensure that you reserve a day for hunting the “Silver King” for he is certainly the star of Key West.
