I started out the week with tarpon on my mind and my clients were in for a real treat. I fished for charters this past week and 3 of them got to see the tarpon go crazy. The first one the tarpon went crazy for about 20 minutes on small glass minnows, but wanted nothing to do with the flies we were throwing and a big crab boat spooked them shortly after they came up. The second trip they never showed up. We decided to fish for snook and trout and they were feeding well. My angler Tom caught 20 nice snook to 26" and 20 nice trout to 18" on live pilchards. Heavy chumming really got the trout going along with big jacks, bluefish, ladyfish and mackeral. My next charters got to see the tarpon go crazy on mullet schools for two hours. They started on the beach and when all was said and done we had followed them a half a mile back into the bay. We caught one fish at 80lbs missed a few and broke two off. We then proceeded to find more off the beaches in the glass minnows. Two more fish were caught in the 60lb range and jumped two others. With the trip almost done I hit one spot in the backwaters and got a quick limit of trout to 19" along with 10 others to get bigger. Yesterday I had a regular client Mike and his daughter Nina for a morning of fishing. We started out on the mullet schools that were getting crushed by tarpon. Mike hooked one that jumped once only to spit it. It was less than five minutes a Nina was in for a 40 minute fight on a big fish at 115lbs. She did a great job getting the fish boat side, nd her biggest fish to date. We jumped one more tarpon before getting a well full of pilchards. I fished one spot for almost two hours after that releasing 6 trout, 15 snook, bluefish, mackeral and all the jacks and ladyfish you could catch. A great week of fishing in Naples
