    
Capt. Jason Ramsey
Unregistered guest
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2001 - 10:35 pm: | |
Subject: It's time to do the "Tarpon Dance"
Life’s a b—ch! (that’s beach of course)
As is quickly becoming the norm around here, I’m going to apologize once again for the delay in getting this report updated. I guess somehow I need to stop trying to put so much effort into each report, and instead try to make them a little more brief, but a lot more frequent. Anyway, the past few weeks have been full of action so I’m gonna try to run through some of it here as quickly as I can.
If you haven’t done it yet, let’s do the tarpon dance…
Just like I wrote in my last report, there is still a lot of great snookin’ to be done around here, but as an admitted “tarpon addict” it’s been real tough to get excited about the linesiders lately! If it is snook you are looking for, the good news is that you won’t have to look too hard. You can find them almost everywhere right now from the rivers all the way out to the Gulf. Pass and beach fishing for snook is a “summer” type of thing traditionally, but I can tell you firsthand that the fish are already there.
How do I know the snook are all the way out the passes already? Because that’s where I travel almost every morning now in search of silver. Silver kings that is. If you looked at your calendar and read a report back around the middle of May, you’d have been reading about fishing for tarpon in the deeper waters within Tampa Bay itself. What can I tell you, traditionally there are a ton of big fish making their way out to the big sandflats just off the beaches within the first week of May, but this season has been a little different. Tarpon season started with a bang back at the end of February and we had a great March, but the winds that blew and the fronts that passed continually toward the end April and into the beginning of May, really put the brakes on our tarpon migration. Thanks goodness for the fish up inside the bay! By mid May the winds were finally co-operating again and the fish were slowly headed closer and closer to the mouth of the bay. The fish that we were hooking up inside the bay were getting a little more infrequent, but the cool news was that the fish still there were huge! In back to back to back days, my partner Capt. John Sackett and I managed fish well over 150 pounds, and had at least two that weren’t much shy of 200.
The tale of just a few trips…
The big fish parade got going on one of the days that I fished with Ward Simpson and his two sons. We fished up in the bay around some of our favorite structure that morning, but given the reluctance the fish were showing relative to eating our baits, I decided that we’d make a move. I pointed my Hydra-Sports toward a deeper ledge that runs alongside one of our big flats where we had a good trout bite a couple day earlier and boy, what a great call! We were on the anchor less five minutes and one of the first baits we tossed got absolutely slammed! We were off to the races. After the battle my partner called and asked if I had seen many fish rolling in the area, but all I could do was reply, “heck, we weren’t there long enough to notice”. Anyway, this fish was HUGE and it proceeded to drag my Hydra-Sports from just off Rattlesnake Key clear across the shipping channel in Tampa Bay and nearly across to Egmont Key. This was undoubtedly one of the biggest fish we’ve landed in the last four years, but even at that size I never expected it could drag us that far. This was a testament to the need for serious tackle when you pursue serious fish. To date I’ve had really good luck with my Penn Powergraph reels, matched up with my 8 foot G.Loomis Surf series rods.
Next day it was time to try something just a little different, but no less taxing on the equipment. Give calm winds that morning, I decided that a run out to one of my favorite wrecks was in order, so off we went. We anchored up, started tossing some chum out on the water and BAM! The fish were there, and they were extremely co-operative. We started with 4 or 5 really nice sharks in the 4-6 foot bracket, then the Spanish mackerel found their way to us, and finally the cobia showed up. We did the catch and release thing with a whole bunch of fish before I decided to see if there was something even larger to play with below the boat. I hooked one of the aforementioned mackerel on one of those same 30 pound G.Loomis tarpon rods and dropped it right down beneath the boat. One minute the “bait” is wiggling nicely, the next it just gets heavy and heads straight to the bottom. Sure enough the jewfish have taken up there summer residence. Well after having at least a couple of our big “baits meet the same demise, and after having battled dozens of these huge fish on much heavier gear, we figured it was time to get back to targeting fish we could realistically land. So back to the cobes etc.. Two nice 35-38 inchers came aboard, another was hooked, and all of a sudden as the cobia swam bright beside the boat… KERSPLASH! A huge boil of water erupted right at the surface as a 2250-300 pound jewfish came up and snarfed the 15 pound fish in one big gulp! Now since we using tarpon size spinning gear I of course, held absolutely no hope of actually fighting this fish for very long, but despite all our past failures on tackle much heavier, Ward’s son battled this fish back to the surface after each and every dive it made. After 30 minutes passed, I still thought it was an exercise in futility, but kept watching with interest. After 45 minutes passed, I was starting to think that there was a remote possibility that we’d actually beat this monster. Well sure enough, I stood in total disbelief as we neared the one hour mark and I slipped my lipgaff into the giant’s mouth. This was an accomplishment unlike anything I have seen, and it definitely deserves “catch of the week” status. Drop an e-mail to me at capt@fishtheflats.com titled “Jewfish” and I’ll return it with a photo of this incredible (especially on light tackle) fish.
While there are very few things that could top the action I had with Ward and his sons, the action on Friday of that week was notable as well. This time not as much for the size of the fish (although the tarpon my partner John did that morning with his client was in the 150 pound bracket), it was for where we were catching them! Sure monster size fish are awesome anywhere you find them, but the Friday before last was the first day that we elected to leave the deeper water within Tampa Bay itself, forgo the opportunity along the flats inside the bay, and head all the way to the big sand flats just outside the passes and into the Gulf. Like I’ve written here before, we don’t necessarily catch more tarpon out on those sand flats than we do in the deeper waters of the bay, but the added thrill you get when you can watch huge pods of trophy fish swimming in crystal clear, shallow water, is just out of this world! On that day I had the great pleasure of fishing with Jay Grubbs from Staff Leasing here in Bradenton, and after spending the morning hours having very little luck up inside the bay, we decided to burn a little gas and go do some exploratory work along Anna Maria Island and Longboat Key. Needless to say, I’m glad we did. Not only did we manage to hook three silver kings that afternoon, but we had one that took us for better than a two hour tour. This fish did exactly what a lot of the bigger fish do in the Gulf, he swam amongst his pod for a while as if he didn’t know he was hooked, then he just headed off straight to the West! Almost tragically though, as his path took us about 2 ½ or 3 miles into deeper water, it also took us into danger’s way. Danger of course for a tarpon usually comes in the form of either hammerhead, or bull sharks. Fortunately for our tarpon this particular hammerhead really didn’t like the sound and commotion that my 175 horse Johnson was making above his head!
Looking ahead…
The trips I talked about above, as well as those days since with Greg Glantz and his architect Alan, the Miselis party, and even the Ziemers were pretty indicative of what you can expect right now. With the tarpon already out on the beaches, you can find them in more locations right now than you’d imagine. Whether you are wanting an absolutely world-class tarpon experience, some great snook action, or you want to take your own shot at those GIANT jewfish, it doesn’t get a whole lot better than this.
Well, I hope that gives you some idea of the world-class action we’ve got going on right now. If you’d like to book a trip that you’ll not soon forget come and visit my website http://fishtheflats.com and we’ll get you hooked-up! Either way, I’ll be out there to let you know what’s going on.
I’ll see you out there,
Capt. Jason Ramsey
(941) 722-1645
|
