Here is an email I just received from one of our friends who got exposed to tropical salt water fly fishing while vacationing with the wife.
"Hi Bill,
Just got back from a 7-day Southern Caribbean cruise vacation last Wednesday. The cruise started and ended in San Juan Puerto Rico. Looked for some saltwater fly fishing at one of the ports of call (St Thomas, St John, St Lucia, St Marteen, Antigua and Barbados) but couldn't find much other than offshore fishing. So I looked into fly fishing in San Juan and found a few guides.
Conversed via email with a guide that specializes in fly fishing for tarpon and booked him for two days (but only got to fish one day because of rain) after the cruise. He fishes the brackish mangrove lined estuary, that surrounds the San Juan airport, and dumps into the Atlantic.
Met him at 6am at the marina and hopped in his Hewes flats boat. He was excited about the conditions - slightly windy with overcast skies. It had rained very! hard the night before, when we were supposed to be fishing, so hard there were flash flood advisories on TV. As a result the water was a milk chocolate color and there was a ton of garbage floating - everything from coconuts to a refrigerator.
Ten minutes from the marina we came to a little lagoon and waited to see if any tarpon were rolling, but no action. So we headed into a little channel and found 5 or 6 rolling tarpon 20-50# range. We didn't get any takes.
So we followed the channel to the big lagoon, looked around for a short while and found a huge pod of tarpon rolling on baitfish. Some were slashing the baitfish off the top. These fish ranged up to 100+# fish and have no idea how many - there were so many fish that you could always see one fish rolling and sometimes several at a time, in every direction around the boat.
Wasn't having much success! - casting to fish but no takes. Then Jose said to slow down the strip, like a bonefish strip. On the next cast felt some tension, strip set, a harder strip set, then a hard sideways rod set and held on.
It was a 40-45# tarpon. It put up a great fight, burned a line-cut into my finger on the initial run, wrapped my knuckle with the reel handle on another run, jumped 4 times, and snapped my 10 weight at the ferrule with the fish next to the boat. When the rod broke, the guide had ahold of the fish, but lost his grip and the leader broke.
I can honestly say that I'm hooked on tarpon fishing now - what a gas.
Randy"
Bookmarks