The combination of fishing knowledge and scientific research shows that a regional approach is needed for tarpon management. BY T. EDWARD NICKENS
M
um was the word. No one catching tarpon in North Carolina’s Pamlico Sound in the 1970s was giving up the goods, and that’s how it stayed so good for so long. That’s how you could go out like Owen Lupton did, and hook 40 tarpon in a day. That’s how you could land 13 solid fish—40 to 80 to 100-plus pounds—in a blistering hot 4-hour stretch of a Tar Heel August, running from rod to rod, yanking pinfish and skates off the hooks so the tarpon could have a crack at the cut bait. Capt. Rick Caton, who today runs Free Agent out of Hatteras, won’t ever forget that day. He won’t ever forget those few years when Pamlico Sound was an unknown tarpon mecca. “You could go out on any slick calm hot summer day and see tarpon rolling in 360 degrees,” he says. “And I’m not talking about hundreds of tarpon. Thousands of tarpon.” But there was a code. Keep your mouth shut when you could. Lie through your teeth when you had to. On Lupton’s boat, there was also a plan: If another boat showed up while he was tarpon
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B O N E F I S H & T A R P O N J O U R N A L SPRING 2024
fishing, he put the big rod down while his children jumped up on the bow to make a show of casting for dink fish. It was the same in Virginia, in the open Chesapeake Bay and along the seaside of the lower Delmarva Peninsula. Ditto in South Carolina’s Winyah Bay and Santee Delta, and in the ocean off the Golden Isles of Georgia. At the time, no one knew precisely where they came from, or how they got there, but significant populations of tarpon showed up in very catchable numbers each summer, far from the more southerly latitudes typically considered their home turf. In the public’s perception, tarpon and tarpon fishing have long been closely associated with Florida’s clear water and subtropical climes, the waters of the Gulf Coast, or more exotic locales in the Caribbean. But among a subculture of serious practitioners in the Mid-Atlantic and upper South—from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia’s saltmarsh-lined coast—tarpon fishing in those waters could be as good as nearly anywhere else in the world. You just had to know the fish were there, mainly during the swelter of summer, and