Got out with Eugene and his son Colton today for a full day. They were down from Maryland area and Colton had just gotten out of the airforce. We planned to do kind of a mixed bag day but tarpon were on the agenda. We caught a handful of baits this morning, with the falling tides in the AM bait hasn’t been real easy. Being Saturday there were a lot of boats out on the water too, unfortunately a few already fishing in the spots where I’d been catching bait. Luckily I had a few good packs of frozen extras to supplement. We checked out where the area where the tarpon had been last week and the other day, but didn’t see much activity and since they didn’t bite there the other day I said lets move on. We stopped to hang the chum bag and caught some live pilchards as well as a few trout on our light tackle while doing that. We hit the area where we had found tarpon yesterday afternoon and still had the morning falling tide. We caught a tarpon right away and then the sharks ate us up. We tried moving around a little, but no more tarpon action and the tide soon died out. We hit a few snook spots, but not much was happening with them. Funny because we had such good bait, but just not many snook around right now even the guys I’ve talked to who do that a lot more haven’t been finding many. We decided to try the tarpon again when the tide switched. We got in front of a hungry pack and had a good little rally, landing one more tarpon and then we jumped off 3 more. Even had a couple bites on our live baits which was fun but unfortunately they came unbuttoned. The sharks eventually moved in and tore us up, again we tried moving around a little bite no more luck. Didn’t seem to be quite as many tarpon as the other day. We finished the day hitting a couple more snook spots, and managed to catch Colton one finally in the last stop. All in all a fun day, really had to work very hard for a handful of fish, but sometimes that is what it takes. Hopefully the little sharks move on soon. I have a half day tomorrow just action fishing, and Monday back to the tarpon game. We will have incoming tides very early which should make the bait catching much easier for the coming week, thankfully! 2 for 5
