Key West Tarpon and Permit

I fished with Shawn and Dwayne this past Tuesday, the day before another strong cold front moves through the Keys. It was flat calm, sunny and warm with fog on the horizon. We found a good number of tarpon rolling and even free jumping at times in a couple of channels near Key West. The tarpon were primarily solitary fish and very scattered. The incoming tide was also very weak and seemed to take forever to get moving, proving difficult to present baits effectively.

Though we didn't get a tarpon we found large areas of floating permit. There must have been thousands of permit all through the area we were fishing. We could see tips of fins and flashes all around. It took some work but we finally got a big twenty pound permit to eat, pictured below with Dwayne. Shawn was up next and after a little while he was hooked up another good sized permit. Unfortunately his permit got around something and broke off. We concluded the day with a big barracuda for Shawn.

Not a bad four hours of fishing!!

Captain Mike Bartlett