By: Chasten Whitfield
This month, I decided to take some me time and go fishing for tarpon with some friends. I am going to be fishing a new body of water to me in Flamingo, FL which is on the south side of Everglades National Park. We launched our boat early morning before the sun rose and headed to our first destination. When we got close we could actually smell the tarpon in the air, which had a smell very different than I ever experienced. As soon as we stopped you could hear them rolling on top of the water, which is such a beautiful sound to listen to, let alone actually see once the sun came up was so very cool. I had never caught tarpon on artificial bait, so I was very new to all of this. We saw a couple tarpon roll and I threw right in front of them and started to work my bait across the water. I missed one tarpon, but I did manage to get a nice little snook. We noticed the tide started turning so we decided to move up towards the mangroves where we saw more tarpon rolling. We threw crank baits with the bills ripped off so they would float a little bit and we caught at least seven tarpons. I must have missed at least twelve others, but I was more excited to feel so much better about using artificial bait now. We made another move to a grass flat before the sun got too hot, as it was a little bit after noon now to catch a redfish to get my inshore grand slam. Some thunder clouds started forming above us, so we knew we had a limited amount of time. Off in the distance we could see tailing redfish, so we moved that way casting out to these fish like crazy, hoping we could hook one before the storms fired up. We were trying to get them to eat anything as we were chasing these fish down like crazy. We hooked up with one but sadly lost it after a couple seconds into the fight. Then we hear a crack at thunder and saw a flash of lightning and knew that was our cue to leave. I tried one more cast just to see what happens and believe it or not, I hooked up on a redfish just as the storms started. We landed this fish got some cool videos and pictures of it and took off towards the boat ramp. My day off with friends helped me get my first inshore slam with artificial bait. I am super excited!