A near perfect evening fishing

 7/29/25

Yesterday I had what was close to the perfect evening fishing. It all started with coming home from work to a nice meal that Opal had made me. This meant that I was able to get out to the gap in the mangroves where I fish relatively early. The wind was dead, which meant calm water and lots of mosquitoes. I find that when the water is calm like this it is harder to catch bait, but if you can, it can be rewarding, leading to big fish. Indeed bait was hard to come by. It probably took ten casts to get bait and it was only a couple shiners, but then on the eleventh cast I pulled in a large 8” mullet. Mullet are the gold standard for bait but the ones I usually catch here are all in the 2”-3” range. By my standards this one was huge. Plus, this one already had a bite mark and by the looks of it there was something big out there. I had the perfect rod for it, a huge classic looking stainless bait casting reel on a large blue rod, a combo my grandad leant me for the summer. The rod and reel scream Hemmingway and look like they belong on a wall and while one day they might end up there I think they should catch something worth a story first. I hooked the mullet with a large circle hook on a wire leader rig and cast it out as far as I could. While it sat, I rigged my go to medium action rod with a much smaller mullet and cast that out too. In almost no time the medium action rod started jerking in the rod holder and I pulled in a big snook. The snook bite has been very good this past week so I have been spoiled with lots of big fish. None the less this was a really big fish, close to my personal best and bigger than anything I am used to catching. After that I caught a catfish which most people consider nuisance fish, but I am not a good enough fisherman to consider anything a nuisance fish, so I was pleased. By that time my mind had drifted away from the 8” mullet on the Hemmingway rod and while I was attempting to catch more bait, I heard the line start to zip out. Normally when a fish is pulling out drag* it makes a high-pitched sound kind of like a zipper on a jacket, with this rod it sounded like gears cranking. I let it run for a few seconds then set the hook. Immediately the fish jumped, and I knew it was a tarpon. When I have hooked tarpon in the past this is where the fight ends but this time the hook stayed in. The fight lasted a good ten minutes and every second of it I was thinking surely it’s going to break free but in the end, I was able to land it. Tarpon get huge and this one wasn’t the biggest, but it also wasn’t nothing and for my first ever tarpon I was elated. Catching anything on the Hemmingway rod and catching a tarpon were two of my fishing goals for the summer. Doing both at the same time was a true gift. Later that evening I caught a Jack Crevalle another new species for me, and a rare fish to catch around here. If I quit there it would have been the perfect evening fishing but I decided to use the Jack carcass for bait and threw it out on the Hemmingway rod. After a half hour or so something took it, but I still had the drag tight from the tarpon and the line snapped immediately. Judging by the way the rod bent I am guessing it was either a large shark or a freight train, it’s impossible to know for sure which. While this came with some disappointment and losing my shark rig, it left me feeling excited to get back out again. Today I bought new wire leaders at the marina store and tomorrow I am going back out.

 

*Drag is a setting you can change on a fishing reel that will let the rod let out line if pulled hard enough, it is used so that if a big fish pulls on your line it doesn’t break. When fishing larger setups it’s common to use a light drag to let the fish run with the bait before tightening the drag to set the hook.