Paddlers, competitors, families and outdoor enthusiasts from around Southwest Florida, the state and the nation attend this one-of-a-kind eco-event.

Festivities include competitive canoe/kayak races, a kayak fishing tournament, paddling clinics and demonstrations, seminars, family activities, archaeological and environmental events, guided tours, and more celebrations along The Great Calusa Blueway.

Great time to go after tarpon in Lee, Collier, Charlotte county waters

BY BYRON STOUT

bstout@news-press.com

Tarpon fishing in Florida is not regulated by seasons. In theory, you can catch a tarpon anytime.

In practice, however, some times are much better than others. And so it is that Southwest Florida’s celebrated Tarpon Season is now upon us.

Tarpon fishing officially began right here in river city, when New Yorker W.H. Wood began documenting his catches on March 19, 1885. Wood actually landed five very respectable fish through the following week — good fishing in anyone’s book — and Lee County waters

remain among the world’s finest for tarpon.

But catching a silver king is not as simple as merely going forth and wetting a line just anywhere. Time and place are everything, as local tarpon experts here attest. Mac and Lois MacKenzie are among the oldest members of Lee’s original tarpon fishing club, the 48-year-old Fort Myers Beach Tarpon Hunters. And each has taken the honor of the club’s first tarpon of the season, in March, by fishing tarpon migrating up the Gulf Coast from the Ten Thousand Islands and Florida Keys. “They work their way from out deep to inshore waters,” said Lois, whose 93-tarpon career began in 1987. At times, she noted, a boat can have a large school of hungry tarpon all to itself.

“Nobody knows they’re out in 30 to 40 feet of water,” said Mac. “Nobody knows how to go out there and look for fish anymore,” as club members often did in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The open waters of the Gulf are vast, and tarpon are relatively small, but the payoff is large. “We like to go out and find them. That’s part of the fun of it,” Mac said.

Tarpon have the ability to take air from the surface and store it in a lunglike structure that enables them to thrive in low-oxygen conditions —not only in water with low dissolved oxygen, but during battles with anglers when their muscles need extra oxygenation. But that air-breathing ability also is a fatal flaw. Anglers often target tarpon spotted rolling at the surface. When Gulf water temperatures are 70 to 72 degrees, the MacKenzies often begin searching at the Mudhole spring, in 40 feet of water west of Wiggins Pass, working north toward the Sanibel Light. They watch for frigate birds, which often follow tarpon, and they always have one eye on their electronic fish-finder, especially around shrimp boats that may have discarded many pounds of tarpon-attracting bycatch, and around “muds” — clouded waters caused by tarpon and cownose rays grubbing for shrimp and crabs on the bottom.

“We’re highly successful in those muds,” Mac said. Meanwhile, Cape Coral Tarpon Hunters often are targeting a completely different subset of “resident tarpon” — fish that have overwintered in local waters, particularly in the warm effluent of the Orange River power plant.

The Cape club’s Web site (www.capecoraltarponhunters.com) notes its first fish of the season was registered March 7, by Maureen Moll. Jerry Geyer, a past president and 19-year member of the 39-year-old Cape club, said “All these fish now are local fish.” Geyer estimated the club had racked up 40 to 50 releases by last week.

“We catch more of our fish in the (Caloosahatchee) river than in the Gulf. Instead of looking for four hours in the Gulf, we go to four different spots in the river. “I call it looking with lines in. The beauty of being in the club is multiple boats looking for fish.” With members’ boats trying their luck at Four Mile Cove, Peppertree Pointe, Glover Bight, or “The Bars” between Big Shell Island and Sword Point, it often doesn’t take long before a hot bite is well known, by radio or cell phone contact with club buddies.

Cape Club members also often fish in the area where the remarkable Mr. Wood registered his first tarpon, on the bay side of Sanibel Island. The natural channel between Intracoastal Waterway Marker 4 and Picnic Island, and the channel dropoff between markers 18 and 20, off

the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, are very popular and dependable spots for early season tarpon.

“There’s usually an influx starting about now,” said Cape tarpon hunter and Reel Anglers Fishing Club member Vince Parkinson. “Those fish will start coming in from the Gulf and heading up through there. A little bit later than that it seems there’s a Gulf run that takes

place around May and June. “We know they’re Gulf fish because they’re bright silver. Some come inside, and some come up the beach.” Capt. Greg Hood, a Cape Coral fishing guide, likes to target tarpon that move into Pine Island Sound’s eastern basins, from Regla Island

north to Captiva Rocks.

Although Easter Sunday can vary from late March to late April, Hood said, “Easter Sunday is usually the day they show up. “When they first get here is the best time to get them, because they’re hungry. After they’ve been here a while and filled up on crabs and ladyfish and pinfish, it’s a little harder to catch them,” he said.

Tarpon continue moving north until they reach Captiva Pass and, soon after, Boca Grande Pass — the ultimate destination for many fish. There they aggregate in schools that ultimately will swim to the edge of the Continental Shelf, 125 miles offshore, to spawn. Capt. Cappy Joiner, president of the Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association, has been working “The World’s Greatest Tarpon Hole” since 1964. Joiner noted tarpon can be in the pass almost any time.

“They were here (the week of March 16) in the pretty weather,” Joiner said, also noting, “Duane Futch caught a fish every day in December, back in 1964.”

But tarpon often leave the pass early in the season, when prolonged high winds muddy the waters, and Joiner is loathe to take people fishing under iffy conditions. “I tell my customers there’s steady fishing beginning the 12th to the 15th of May.

In years past we had tarpon right on through the summer. The only reason we quit was it got so hot, our customers quit coming.” Now, Joiner said, tarpon sometimes go offshore to spawn during the last spring tides in June (June 24, this year) and don’t return.

“Last year and the year before, we had fish all the way through June. In ‘06 we lost them.”

Some tarpon inevitably return to the waters of Charlotte Harbor after spawning, there to remain through the summer. The harbor waters, black and rich from runoff, provide abundant food in the form of herrings, crabs, catfish and ladyfish.

“The late summer fishing for post-spawn tarpon is good in the deep holes of the harbor, in the mouth of the Myakka River and in the upper end of Matlacha Pass,” said Capt. Ralph Allen, owner of the King Fisher fleet of charter boats at Fishermen’s Village in Punta Gorda.

Allen noted some of those post-spawn tarpon also overwinter in the Peace River, where mining for phosphate pebble created dredge holes as deep as 30 feet. Those fish were reported biting last week. So, too, were fish in the Caloosahatchee, between Interstate 75 and the railroad trestle. Although dormant for much of the winter, the golden tarpon of the rivers come alive with a vengeance in spring.

“An angler recently went 0 for 6 with plugs,” Parkinson said of a club report noting the ratio of tarpon hooked, versus fish ultimately landed and released. He also noted another hookup by an angler fishing a live mullet under a balloon — an technique that produces explosive

chases and strikes on the river flats. What better way to begin the tarpon season?