Chasten Whitfield
This is my family’s most wonderful time of the year. We fish, prepare meals, and tarpon fish on some of the best tides of the year. We plan ahead and try to make use of all the time that we’ll have together; my brother and I saving our tarpon crabs in a crab pen at the dock. On this particular Saturday my mom and I headed out to see if we could see any tarpon on the beach. We saw a few, watched them, came back to the dock picked up my brother and dad and headed back out for the afternoon tide. Watching all the boats fishing the pass, we decided that we were going to go on the outside of the other boats as it appeared the tarpon were coming from the beach into pass. We anchored up on the outside in about 14 foot of water and began to chum with four lines out on live bait, one dead bait, one crab, and one on chunk bait. Within ten minutes my line starts going off (chunk bait)! Like clockwork, once on, Mom throws the anchor ball and my brother and dad reel in the other lines. I wanted my brother to have this fish, as the only tarpon he had ever caught was a juvenile and I wanted him to see and feel the bite that these fish give. I was sure that the hook was set in this tarpon as I handed it over to my brother. Dad took the wheel and began to chase down the tarpon. There are a couple reasons we chase down tarpon; if there are sharks in the same area we want to be able to help the tarpon not get caught by the shark and the other reason is with all the other boats in the same pass, you will either break off hitting someone else’s line or their boat is going to break it off. My brother fought this tarpon for about 45 minutes and we could tell the tarpon was getting tired. We got him alongside and heard someone shout shark! We could hear other boats engines rev up as the captains out here know exactly what to do to save tarpon from the sharks. We looked around to make sure my tarpon was safe as we immediately started idling the boat forward to run the water through his gills for a revived release before a shark gets near so he is strong enough to get away. Needless to say, we did not get many pictures of the tarpon next to the boat but that is alright because the tax man didn’t get him and he will live to give someone else a fight the next time!
