# Tarpon in Galveston Daily News



## Scott (May 24, 2004)

Some think tarpon making a comeback

By Sarah Viren 
Correspondent 
Published March 29, 2009

By SARAH VIREN

Correspondent

On an October night two years ago, a 25-year-old casting for redfish off the Galveston pier reeled in a mammoth tarpon instead, breaking a state record from 1973. The nearly 211-pound catch, soon fodder for gossip among anglers up and down the Texas coast, seemed to confirm rumors about a resurgence of the famed sports fish. 

Once a marine gold mine, which brought presidents and dignitaries for guided fishing trips to the Lone Star State, tarpon had nearly vanished from Texas by the 1960s. In the ensuing decades, most accepted the loss, but a few continued hunting the prehistoric fish, which is prized as much for its fight when caught as the near-human proportions of its silver-scaled body. And recently scientists have joined them, leading a renaissance of research on tarpon, much of it coming out of Texas. 

Their hope is twofold: explain the disappearance of tarpon in Texas so many years ago and figure out how to bring them back. It’s an experiment that could have huge economic implications for the state. In Florida, tarpon fishing brings in an estimated $3 billion in tourism dollars each year, according to Jerald Ault, a scientists studying them at the University of Miami. Louisiana and Mexico also boast lucrative tarpon fisheries. 

“People here in Texas are wanting to see them come back to their glory days,” Art Morris, a coastal fisheries outreach specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, said. A fan of the fish, Morris is working on an online system to monitor Texas tarpon populations. Other researchers in the state are collaborating on a Gulf-of-Mexico-wide effort to tag and track their migration, and scientists at Sea Center Texas have been trying, without success so far, to spawn tarpon in captivity.

Marking the spots

One man fishing out of Galveston boasts better understanding of Texas tarpon than any of these researchers. Capt. Mike Williams is 62 and has been chartering tarpon trips since 1983. He believes tarpon never disappeared, just moved further offshore — pushed there, he hypothesizes, by the damming of Texas rivers, which cut off freshwater flow to estuaries and inshore waters that tarpon once roamed en masse. 

For about 10 years, starting in 1967, Williams logged the locations of anyone lucky enough to catch a so-called Silver King and marked these spots on an old map. 

None of it made sense until one night, while watching a World War II movie, Williams started tracing lines through the Xs on his map.

“What it showed was a corridor, a road, if you will, in the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. 

Williams, before Hurricane Ike, operated from the Galveston Yacht Basin, booking anglers from across the country. During the tarpon season, stretching from May into November, Williams estimated he could earn up to $800 a day on fishing charters.

One day last summer, at a spot 6 miles off shore, Williams pointed to the depth recorder, which showed dozens of fish swimming below the boat. This, he said, was “tarpon alley.” 

Population puzzle

A couple of new tarpon studies out of Texas indicate Williams is partially right, but so were those who claimed the fish disappeared. 

About four years ago, Joan Holt, associate director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, analyzed the tarpon scales that anglers used to hang on the walls of the famed Tarpon Inn in Port Aransas, a spot that President Franklin Roosevelt visited during his tarpon-fishing trip in 1937. In those days, old-timers claim, tarpon were so plentiful inshore they bordered on a nuisance. 

Numbering close to 2,700, the scales, most of which include an inscription of the date and size of the catch, provide the only historic record of these tarpons’ demise, and, Holt said, support the story that the population in that area took a nose-dive. 

“If you look at the graph, the peaks were in the ’30s and ’40s, and after that it is almost nothing,” she said.

Work by geneticists with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department helps to explain what happened. In a worldwide study of tarpon genetics, biologists identified at least two populations in Texas. 

One comes from Florida and migrates to the upper Texas coast in the warmer months, likely traveling along the “alley” that Williams fishes. But the bigger population, and the population that likely lost fish in the 1960s, appears to originate from Veracruz, Mexico.

Migration studies out of Florida and Texas support this, and researchers now theorize that mass kill tournaments and the slaughter of tarpon for food off Mexican shores contributed to the sudden population drop. 

“You cannot take care of this species only from your backyard,” Parks and Wildlife biologist Ivonne Blandon said. “Everything is interconnected.” 

Tarpon Tomorrow

The big push now is to get anglers and researchers working together, both here and in Mexico. In 1999, Corpus Christi attorney Paul Swacina formed a group called Tarpon Tomorrow, which puts tarpon anglers and fish biologists in the same room, to talk and brainstorm. 

Five years later, the group headed a symposium in Veracruz with invitees from both the United States and Mexico. And in August, Tarpon Tomorrow had a tournament in Galveston, both to promote the sport and help scientists tag fish for further migration studies.

Researchers want to figure out where tarpon breed off Mexican shores and how to preserve the baby and juvenile tarpon spawned there. But more importantly, they are trying to raise the international profile of the fish. 

And there are indications this is working. The catch off Galveston pier in 2006 was symbolic of a comeback. A state census of all fish taken each year for the past 30 years also noted the highest number of tarpon in 2003 and 2007, Morris said.

Then, there are the anecdotal tales from a growing number of tarpon guides now following Williams into the business. 

Tarpon fanatic Scott Graham, who has led fly fishing trips for tarpon off Port O’Connor, told a story not long ago about one magnificent day in 2007 when the tarpon were so plentiful their silver bodies filled “acres and acres and acres” of open sea. 

It was, for that afternoon at least, a return to the glory days. 

Former Daily News reporter Sarah Viren is a freelance journalist residing in Iowa.


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## johnmyjohn (Aug 6, 2006)

Good read, enjoyed that.


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## houfinchaser (Oct 10, 2008)

Great Article. Galveston News in my opinion puts out great local information a far cry from the Chronicle.


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## Scott (May 24, 2004)

Unfortunately, some of this article is old information.

For example, Sea Center Texas no longer has its tarpon. 

But you should never knock a little PR


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## capt mullet (Nov 15, 2008)

I am hoping I catch as many tarpon this year as Ihave the past few years in Florida. So hopefully there is some truth to this article and the best thing that could happen to us is rain. The more it rains the closer the tarpon will get!!! Not looking good so far but the pattern coulkd change as it gets hotter! In Tampa this would be my first week at the skyway bridge looking for tarpon. I actually started catching them this week last year on the bridge. Dead sticking ladyfish about 2-8 ft from the large piers in 10-12 ft of water. They love ladyfish over there since it is the most numerous fish in the bay over there. You can also drift live threadfin herring near the pylons if u can catch them or if they are around. By may the threadfin are easy to catch with sabikis but the bait is just showing up now so they arent always there. When they show up in big numbers about the end of April you can chase them with the trolling motor and throw mirrolures and baitbusters at them off the beachfront but live bait was really the way to get multiple hookups. So throwing threadfins at them instead of a plug was the ticket when chasing them and would get you more bites. Man I love talking tarpon just 8-10 more weeks and it should be time to start looking for them. I can t wait!!!!


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## squidmotion (Apr 5, 2007)

i can't imagine what it is like to strip stike a fly into one of those hard mouths... 

i'll be looking again this year!


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