Life on the Water, Tim Gleason
October 2024
It was a great summer of juvenile tarpon fishing. Who knows how many I jumped. I had some of my best days for raw numbers of fish jumped including a personal best of 20 one crazy morning.
Unfortunately attrition was high that morning as I was fishing super tight creeks and the fish were a bit larger than usual. On some fish I has happy to get my fly line back intact after fish were jumping 6 feet in the air way back in the trees. To my consternation they were keyed in on micro glass minnow most of the summer as seems to be the new pattern over the last few years. Some days it was hard to get them to bite anything you threw at them.
Other days they were pigs and eat whatever. You just had to get out early and look around until you found them. The fish just are not setting up in the same spots year to year. I fished a number of spots this year that I have never been to before. Mostly small creeks. It is quite interesting hooking a forty pound fish in a 15 foot wide creek. It is a challenge to say the least. I call it combat fishing. I switched to shorter fly rods in these scenarios. They have helped on a number of fronts both for taking less room to make a cast and getting control of the fish faster. My landing ratio went up considerably once I made that switch. One day I even went 10 for 12 which is pretty good for me.
When I talk about counting the tarpon I have “caught” I usually speak in terms of jumping Tarpon - not landing. Stuff just seems to happen with those things that prevent you from actually landing them. Their mouths are rock hard making hook penetration difficult and rough like cinder blocks chafing your leaders until they break. They also jump and twist exploiting the above 2 traits throwing your hook or broken leader right back at you. They also seem to expose any weakness in your gear or rigging as well. One of the things tarpon will expose is your bad knots. If they aren't done right, tarpon will find a way to break them. If a knot doesn't look right/perfect after you tie it, cut it out and start again.
Nothing worse than working for hours trying to catch a tarpon and then finally hooking one only to have knot failure. Ask me how I know. I'm lucky if I land 40% of the tarpon I jump but it is still so cool to feel that bite and then see that first muscular surge as you set the hook and the fish explodes into the air. OK, enough tarpon for a while. Can you tell I am obsessed?
Teamwork in Fishing – I have a small group of friends who are avid fisherman and guides. Even if we aren't fishing together on a given day, one thing we do share is information. I always say fishing is 90% intel and 10% ability. By sharing info on water quality, bait concentrations and fish, a small group of guys can cover a lot more water than one. Be careful who you allow into your group but as long as you are not crowding each other, you can spend a lot more time in productive water as opposed to searching for it.
Since a lot of the fishing I do is in water that is too shallow to run a trolling motor, fishing can actually become a true team sport. One guy pushing the boat from a poling platform with a push pole and one guy fishing. Without the second person you are not even in the game. I can take as much satisfaction poling a buddy onto a fish as actually catching it myself. There is a real skill to doing it well.
If you are an offshore guy, just having a buddy or two available to split costs is huge with the price of fuel. It can make the difference between going and not being able to afford to go. If you don't have any friends who are available and enjoy the same type of fishing you do, there are various local fishing clubs and online resources available to meet people with similar interests. I met one of my fishing buddies on microskiff.com when he reached out to the internet looking for someone to fish with as he had off during the week and had no one to fish with. Not only was he an excellent fisherman, he showed me a bunch of places I had never fished before.
Scouting / Exploring New Spots – I am the worst at exploring; usually hammering my “normal” spots that I know work on certain seasonal, tide and wind combinations. When I do take the time to go to places I don't normally fish I am usually happy I did. Now that the seasons are changing into fall, it is even more important to do so as you never know where this season's hot spot will be. Even if I don't see any fish or catch anything, I usually learn something about the area and I see some awesome places.
This tarpon season was a good example. I have never caught so many fish at places not only had I never seen a tarpon before but at places I have never even fished before. Try it. You might find something cool. Take today for instance. Fishing was pretty slow so I took my own advice and hit some spots I haven't fished in a forever. I hooked a decent snook and was getting in close to the boat when a bull shark ate it right off my fly. Well that never happened before. Watch your fingers releasing fish!
Tarpon Streak – Since I was gone for a third of September up in North Carolina on vacation I put myself at a bit of a disadvantage to continue my catching (actually landing, not jumping) a tarpon every month streak. On my first day back, there was not a tarpon to be found in the usual haunts of my area.
I was not happy. It looked like tarpon season was over. The next day, I decided to take a deep breath and just go fishing. I found some good concentrations of glass minnows and proceeded to catch a mess of snook up to 29 inches. The following day I had to go back and look for some poon though. Still nothing around. On the way home, I decided to do a bit of cheating and head to my baby tarpon honey hole at the back end of a canal to see if I could nab a baby. I have saved my streak a couple of times by hitting it late in the month if I hadn't landed a tarpon yet. There were not a bunch of fish but I saw a couple rolling out in the distance at the end of the canal. I had a chance. It didn't take long before a little 3 pounder slurped my 2 inch long black deer hair slider. It was hooked well and got it in my hands after a few acrobatic jumps. Month 57 in the books!
Well that’s it for this edition. See you out on the water. To follow some of my fishing life check out my Instagram account @timgleasonphotography
Tim Gleason
https://www.timgleasonphotography.com/
