Mission Accomplished

It had been a while. A long while since my good friend Mike and I had been out fishing. He had heard all my tarpon stories at work, and wanted to do battle himself, so myself  and co-worker Chad decided it would be our mission for the day to do just that; put him on his first silver king.

The day started off just like all others. Bait was caught at out favorite markers and off to the Skyway we went, ready for what should have been great action, being a weekday hill tide. Chad and I figured the crabs should be flushing well and the lack of fishing pressure would give us free reign to do what we wanted. The bridge was ours.

After lining up, the bridge was ours, no one was in sight, and we started waiting for the pass crab flush. We freelined threadfins for quite some time and started getting a little frustrated. An hour seemed like forever. Sure, we all had a few grouper, sharks and mackerel to keep us entertained, but the star of the show had not made an appearance just yet.

A few hours passed and we felt a little dejected. No crabs were moving out with the hard flowing tide, no tarpon had hit our threadfins, and our beer was running out, along with our patience.

Finally a couple crabs started flowing but these precious commodities were few and far between. We had about a half dozen pass crabs and a monster blue crab. All three of us kept telling ourselves that it only takes one, but discouragement set in.

Finally, while drifting that huge blue crab the hit came. Drag was screaming and there was a tarpon on the line. The rod was quickly handed to Mike and it was game on. After about five minutes, with Mike sweating and already a little tired, we advised our good buddy that the fight would be at least another fifteen minutes so he better just hang on and enjoy the ride. Mike fought the fish well, well enough to actually keep the battle from going past the twenty minute mark as we had said. Of course, there were some very tense moments, as we were all hoping the fish wouldn’t shake the hook or break off on the rocky bottom. This may have been our only chance. Mike lucked out. Needless to say he was stoked, and I was lucky enough to get some boatside pictures of his catch, along with the fight.

Chad and I set out to put one of our good friends on a fish, and we accomplished our mission. Now we could relax and spirits were high on the boat. After another hour of waiting, we left, but left feeling good that Mike had a memory of a lifetime.