Chapter 8 Tarpon In The Moonlight
It’s the naked, raw power that impresses you most about a tarpon, I suspect.
Words like “Magnificent!” come to mind as you see the angler set up on the long rod when the heavy fish takes the whole spot bait, feels the hook, and skyrockets out of the water into the air on a tail-walk across one hundred feet of ocean surface.
It’s the line peeling runs that get to you. He is a worthy battler with as strong a self-preservation instinct as there is, and your admiration for him is very great.
On a sundrenched late afternoon off the southeast corner of Baldhead Island, I sat in a tossing outboard bucking the chop. It was like riding a rodeo bronco through its paces. I’d come to see a monumental battle with tarpon as Mike Merritt and Doc Williams of Wilmington and Bill Tripp of Shallotte showed me their secret.
The great white fish were rolling everywhere, and we later estimated we’d seen perhaps as many as fifteen to twenty in the course of the afternoon. The tarpon relentlessly worked a large school of pogies and repeatedly broke the surface in their wild charges through the schools of bait. It was a salt water angler’s dream, and we had seats on the proverbial fifty yard line.
The anglers baited up with spots and cast then with 6/0 reels on very long surf rods to the nearby sloughs. At first they caught bluefish – two or three pounders – that went for the pro-offered baits. There might have been eight or ten such blues reeled in. Then the tide changed and began to flood through the channel where we were anchored, and the boat swung around in the opposite direction with the stern to seaward. Mike had done his homework and said tarpon are scavengers and feed on the bottom often.
As Doc and Bill fished to the sides, Mike fished two rods off the stern, repeatedly casting the 6/0 reels halfway to Wrightsville. With effortless ease Mike was sailing that spot out there a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy-five feet, dropping the rod each time in the holder with the reel in free spool and the clicker on with the star drag set with light tension. It was a matter of waiting for the great fish to show.
And then it happened. A tarpon took one of Mike’s baits, ran momentarily on the bottom with the spot, and Mike set up on him. The fish came out of the surface like a bat escaping from hell, slung his head a couple times, and threw the hook. Mike recovered the tackle, baited up, and threw out another spot. The anglers had six or eight similar strikes during the time the sun was setting. “It is very difficult for a hook to penetrate the tough inner mouth of the tarpon,” Mike explained, “and most fish are lost unless the hook catches the lips of the fish or the mouth plates.”
Off to the northeast Rudy and Sandy Wallace were working the tarpon, and we watched as Sandy hooked a tarpon that appeared to go over a hundred pounds. Sandy stood in the bow with a light tackle outfit as the boat followed the running fish a mile offshore from where the action started. Dusk came, and Baldhead’s palm trees faded from view.
In our own boat Bill Tripp was the man of the hour as one of the searching tarpon found his bait. The hook was set with a mighty strike of the rod, and then all hell broke loose. The tarpon came out of the water with gills flared, head thrown violently from side to side, and tailfin beating against the water as the fish ran powerfully against the star drag. Bill held the sharply bent over rod against the run of the fish, and the muscles of his arms and upper chest bulged in opposition to the weight and stress of the fish on the tackle.
The tarpon stripped one hundred and fifty yards of line off in a heart beat, and the reel grudgingly gave the line to the superior strength of the fish. The tarpon no longer tore at the surface in frantic jumps but settled in to a powerful sustained run towards deeper water seaward of the shoals.
In each boat there was a man against a powerful and worthy opponent, and the discussion between man and fish went on and on. Mike Merritt believes it is a matter of keeping on the pressure, and he offered quiet advice to Bill holding the rod. He progressed past the point of being tired to gain line and bring the fish alongside. After an hour or so we closed a little, and you could see the tarpon at the surface with his dorsal fin clear, swimming away from the boat. Bill reeled until the fatigue of the fish and the tension on the line caused the tarpon to circle the boat, coming nearer each time he passed. At last Mike had him alongside, and he reached down the leader until the fish was close enough to gaff.
Mike hit him with the gaff, and the magnificent fish beat hell out of the side of the boat. It was all Mike could do to hold onto the gaff, but at last he lifted the tarpon into the cockpit where he lay quietly on the deck with the gills working smoothly and offered no further resistance.
A full moon had risen out of the sea in the east, and the silver white flanks of the fish shone in the moonlight. The form of the fish was streamlined and beautiful to the eye, and you knew he was built to cover vast distances in the sea powerfully and with ease. This gladiator of the sea had fought to the death, neither asking nor giving any quarter. He was a remarkable trophy. Bill Tripp was ecstatic in his joy and pleasure and planned to mount the tarpon.
We fired the engines and returned to the inshore slough and put out new baits. Soon we were joined by Rudy and Sandy, who had lost his fish after more than an hour. We fished into the night, but soon the sharks came, and we knew it was over. Tarpon fever hits these anglers with all the impact of first love. The season for these great fish is from mid-July through September, and Baldhead is rightly called Tarpon Junction. Mike and his friends speculate the tarpon come north in singles in the spring following schools of menhaden, remain for a time in local waters as far as from Baldhead to Topsail, and trail the migrating schools of popeye mullets south in September. On earlier trips than ours Mike had a one hundred thirty-seven pounder at Baldhead, and Rudy Wallace got one that went a hundred and forty-seven pounds.
That’s a pair of horses, man!
The following text and photo was reprinted (with permission from Sam McDonald) from Bill McDonald’s book Song of Cape Fear. Bill’s photography and coverage of sport fishing appeared in the 70s and 80s in the Wilmington Star News, the State Port Pilot, the Coastal Carolinian, and the Island Gazette.
