Shiloh Road Topwater Tarpon

Late this afternoon after working on my Husquvarna lawn tractor, Karen persuaded me to take Elmo and Odie for a ride.

Never being one to lose an opportunity to wet a line, Karen and I loaded the "boys" into the truck and headed out to check out some areas she hadn't seen in a while.

We stopped at MickyDs and grabbed a couple of milkshakes before heading to Shiloh Road.

We pulled into the first culverts at the road and found the water levels had risen substantially.  Karen spotted some fish pushing wakes but we couldn't tell what they were and since it was late, I didn't bother tossing a lure around.

We drove up to the barrier and let Elmo and Odie out to do their thing and walked to where a lot of bank fishermen live bait for big redfish.

I took a spinning rod along with me and when I spotted some tarpon rolling, decided to throw a couple of casts to them.

After the third or fourth retrieve, I had a tarpon bust on the topwater XPS series popper that I had tied on. 

The fish blasted the popper entirely out of the air but didn't get hooked.

I made a couple more casts into the area with no hits so we headed back to the truck that I parked at the barrier.

Before leaving, Karen took the boys to relieve themselves, so I started blind casting near the barrier.

As luck would have it, I finally hooked up to a tarpon that was about 4 feet long on the second cast.  The fish jumped several times before I could get Karen to use my cell phone to video the action.

The results below were pretty good considering the circumstances.

I almost lost the fish in the brush and just when I thought I could bring it to the bank for a couple of pics, the tarpon made one last jump and tossed back my popper.

After losing the fish I made several more casts around the area, but with all the commotion, the tarpon bite was put down.

We got back to the truck and drove into the refuge towards Haulover Canal and decided to run down Lab Road.  When we crossed Haulover Bridge, there was a large group of Kayakers around Bair's Cove and several boats fishing the deep holes at the mouth of the Mosquito Lagoon.

We drove into Bio Lab and saw only two other people fishing the area.  One gentleman was in a kayak with a large cooler enjoying the afternoon, and the other guy had several rods out for reds.

Karen wanted to see where I have been catching juvenile tarpon so when we got to Playalinda Beach road, I stopped briefly to check out the Vistas where the tarpon had been.

It was around 7:30 pm, so I only made a few quick casts into the area just for the hell of it and as expected, did not get a hit.

Karen was hungry and so was I, so we headed back to the house and put on some pork chops for dinner.

Till next time
Tight Lines