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The great tarpon debate: Jiggers are killing our fish, and our fishery

The following article by David Futch appears in the January edition of Pirate Coast Magazine. It is reproduced here  with permission.

Nathaniel Reed refuses to mince words when it comes to snagging tarpon with a jig that kills them or leaves them so exhausted they become an easy meal. According to Reed, a nearly-dead tarpon having fought for an hour or more after being foul-hooked with a jig becomes easy prey for tiger, hammerhead and bull sharks.

“It’s disgusting to me,” said the former advisor to two U.S. presidents, five Florida governors and the head of a movement to save the Everglades. “It’s not a fishing technique that any sportsman would embrace.”

Or most states, where snagging fish is illegal. Jigging is legal in Florida. Snagging fish is not.        But those in charge of protecting the state’s fish population refuse to enforce an anti-snagging law that’s been on the books for 20 years.

Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission Executive Director Nick Wiley claims that an FWC biologist told him that jigging for tarpon and snagging them has no adverse affect on the stock’s health. Apparently Wiley never talked to Eva Johnson, who works at the Boca Grande Lighthouse Museum overlooking Boca Grande Pass: the home of the world’s greatest tarpon fishing.

Johnson, gift shop manager at Lighthouse Museum, watched two summers ago as dead tarpon floated out to sea following a Professional Tarpon Tournament Series contest where fishing guides jigged for tarpon.

“It was horrendous. There were dozens,” said Johnson, who does not fish for tarpon. “After the tournament fish were weighed in, they took them up into the harbor. They torture and manhandle the fish by fighting them for 45 minutes or more. I stopped going to work in the summer because I couldn’t stand to watch the carnage. Visitors who have come to the Lighthouse Museum have told me they’ve seen many dead tarpon on the beach following the jigging tournaments. The jiggers have no respect for the tarpon. This story is just a microcosm of the damage that’s been done to Florida. I don’t have much hope for the tarpon or the fishing guides to prevail (in trying to get rid of jigging).”

For nearly a century, Boca Grande Pass was THE place to go to catch one of the great game fish. Not so much anymore.

An invasion of off-island fishing guides from Port Charlotte to New Port Richey over the past two decades created a them-against-us struggle between third- and fourth-generation Gasparilla Island fishing guides and the outsiders who jig for and snag tarpon. Boca Grande guides say the increased boat traffic and jigging puts so much pressure on tarpon that they don’t follow normal feeding patterns.

“With live bait fishing for tarpon, you’re taking a fish that wants the bait, eats the bait, is hooked in the lip and is not subjected to exhaustion,” said Reed, who first came to Boca Grande in the early 1960s to fish with his Gasparilla Island friend Charles Engelhard. “By hooking a tarpon in the lip, you can apply maximum pressure and bring a tarpon in fairly quickly. Snagging foul hooks the tarpon in body parts other than the bony lip and they’ll fight a long time and to the death.

“The (anglers) who embrace jigging are clients who are promised a major number of tarpon hookups by unscrupulous fishing guides who don’t tell those clients they’re snagging tarpon. Snagging tournaments should be banned because the only thing they’re doing is feeding sharks.”

The fight between jig fishermen and Boca Grande guides has become so heated that for years now, island guides have referred to the off-island guides in many unflattering terms. The off-island guides say Boca Grande guides are bullies who want Boca Grande Pass to themselves.

The Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association has asked the FWC’s Wiley to enforce their own rule against snagging fish, specifically tarpon. Nathaniel Reed has added his name and support to enforce the no-snagging rule. If Wiley fails to enforce the rule, Reed said, “I’m prepared to be named in a lawsuit.”

Repeated attempts to contact Wiley went unanswered. Wiley took over January 4th as FWC’s new executive director. Wiley’s predecessor Ken Haddad refused to enforce the anti-snagging rule and called the fight a user conflict between those who use jigs to catch tarpon and the Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association who use live bait.

There’s no denying there’s a user conflict. Jiggers want their jigs and native Gasparilla guides don’t. The problem facing the Guides Association is one of numbers – tens of thousands of anglers come to Boca Grande Pass each spring and summer and use artificial jigs to catch tarpon while approximately 35 island guides and a few dozen supporters use live bait or flies to catch silver kings.

Jigs aside, the other threat to tarpon is the reckless manner in which jig guides operate their charter boats with high-powered, noisy outboards, racing through the Pass to corral tarpon and hammer them with jigs, Boca Grande fishing guides said.

Native guides have a set of rules, a fishing etiquette passed down through four generations on how to fish for tarpon. The short version is don’t be in a hurry and wait your turn to drift through the pass.

Reed said he recently pulled the FWC’s Wiley aside at the dedication of a new building at the University of Florida.

“I told Mr. Wiley our objections to snagging tarpon and he responded that an FWC biologist had performed a study that showed no detriment to tarpon and he was supporting the biologist’s findings that tarpon aren’t injured or die from snagging,” Reed said. “I told him I didn’t give a damn about a report. This free-swinging hook is an unsporting lure that should be banned because it snags fish.”

Attorney Joseph D. Farish, Jr. has been fishing for Boca Grande Pass tarpon since the early 1950s. Farish represents the Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association in its quest to stop tarpon snagging, and has seen the carnage and witnessed the demise of tarpon fishing. Last summer, Farish fished for tarpon over a two-day period and received one pull-down for his efforts. He never saw a tarpon on the end of his hook.

“This rig is not a catching device,” Farish said. “It takes the sport out of it. With a weighted jig in a mass of fish all you have to do is snag them. You might as well go spear fishing for them. It’s an easy way for a novice to catch a tarpon.”

Farish offered his take on the new breed of outside guides who’ve invaded the Pass: “They’re a bunch of punks who come in and don’t bring anything to the island,” Farish said. “They put their boats in at Placida, run to the Pass and fish, run back to Placida after and never set foot on the island or in a store.”

Capt. Cappy Joiner and Capt. Mark Futch of the Guides Association agree jig fishing and snagging tarpon distresses silver kings and want it stopped. Damage to the tarpon fishery in Boca Grande Pass also can be blamed on jig-fishing tournaments, Guides Association president Joiner said.

“They’ll be 50 boats in each of those jig tournaments and 150 lines in the water,” Joiner said. “The loud outboards and the amount of traffic and how they operate their boats are big problems.”

Mark Futch said jig guides are to blame for driving the fish out of the Pass.

“Tarpon try to move into the Pass and the jiggers run to wherever the fish congregate and pound on them so hard they don’t naturally move into the deep hole,” Futch said. “They move out of the Pass. I’ve seen them run miles up into Charlotte Harbor to Oyster Shoals.”

Both Joiner and Futch are resigned that it may be too late to save Boca Grande Pass tarpon.

“At the end of the day, jigging is a huge problem but whatever the Guides Association does probably won’t matter,” Futch said. “Those fish have suffered so much for so many years they won’t put up with the pressure from hundreds of boats trying to snag them. Exactly what we said years ago was going to happen is going to happen. The tarpon are going to leave.”

Joiner is not optimistic the FWC will try to protect tarpon whether the fish are in the Florida Keys or Boca Grande Pass or Tampa Bay.

“It’s like beating a dead horse,” Joiner said. “It’s difficult to sue or get the state government to do anything. Once the voters of Florida gave the FWC their power, it’s been hard to go before the FWC and get them to change anything.”

Joiner has another wild card up his sleeve if the FWC refuses to enforce its anti-snagging rule.

“If this doesn’t work, we’ll go to the FWC and try to do away with the possession tag, which means the jigging tournaments would have to go away because without a possession tag, you can’t take the fish and you can’t lift it out of the water to either take a picture or see how much it weighs. Headache’s done. If we turn the other cheek and don’t fight this, one of these days Boca Grande will be like Corpus Christi, Texas where tournaments ruined tarpon fishing. ”

Padre Island and the Corpus Christi fishermen once boasted they had more tarpon than Boca Grande and likely were right, according to Aaron Adams of the Bonefish-Tarpon Trust on Pine Island.

From the 1900s to the 1950s, Aransas Pass and Corpus Christi had so many tarpon people considered them a nuisance, Adams said. The Texas tarpon fishery collapsed in the 1960s and ‘70s in part to unbridled killing as well as the damming of nearby rivers which destroyed the estuaries.

“We’re trying to get more information so we can be more cautious so that what happened in Aransas does not happen in Boca Grande,” Adams said. “We don’t want the fishery to fall apart and then do something about it.”

The Bonefish-Tarpon Trust raises money through private donations to pay for bonefish and tarpon satellite tags and satellite time.

“We’re scientists,” Adams said of the Trust, “but we’re also fishermen.”

Adams stopped short of refuting the suspect FWC study that concludes the Boca Grande Pass tarpon fishery is healthy, offering this instead, “Boca Grande Pass is a data black hole because not enough studies have been done.”

A tarpon’s migratory pattern is staggering. One tarpon tagged in the Florida Keys by the Trust was caught in Chesapeake Bay; another was 200 miles south of Cape Cod when its tag popped to the surface. Others have made their way to Mexico and Nicaragua.

Adams is on board with the anti-snagging faction but is staying away from the fray in Boca Grande.

“In most states snagging or lifting is illegal and I’m opposed to it because it’s just not right,” Adams said. “It’s the same thing as spearing them. I’m a fly fisherman and it’s frustrating to me why people no longer have etiquette when fishing.”

He said he sees anglers running up on fish at full speed while other fishermen have been waiting in silence for a school of tarpon to swim by.

Futch referred to jiggers as snaggers who claim jigging is a better way to catch a tarpon.

“It’s not a better way. It’s an easier way but it damages or kills the fish,” Futch said. Futch offered another question regarding jigging for tarpon.

“How come Boca Grande Pass is the only place in Florida where anglers jig for tarpon? It’s because the tarpon are concentrated enough in great numbers and the pass is deep enough. I should know. I was the one, along with my fishing partner George Melissas, who invented the breakaway jig to catch tarpon to win tournaments. I saw the problem with it and quit doing it because everyone started doing it and I started seeing a lot of dead tarpon.”

The Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association and Farish originally filed a lawsuit in Leon County Circuit Court asking a judge to get the FWC to enforce its own rule prohibiting snagging. The judge ruled the group failed to exhaust all administrative relief appeals, sending the Association back to the FWC. In December 2009, Farish filed a declaratory decree with the FWC to enforce its own anti-snagging rule.

A decision from Wiley was expected in mid-January.

On its website, the Professional Tarpon Tournament Series disagrees with the Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association claim that the “jig” used by many of its’ participants and fans is a snagging or designed breakaway device.

In 2004, scientists at the Florida Wildlife Research Institute, the FWC’s research arm, conducted a study of tarpon catch and release mortality and the incidences of foul hooking of tarpon in Boca Grande. The study found foul hooking using the methods of live bait or “jig” fishing did not contribute significantly to the mortality of tarpon.  The report also pointed out foul hooking is normal in hook and line fishing, and the percentages of foul hooking of tarpon by anglers using the “jig” was in accord with foul-hooking percentages recorded in other fisheries.

In October, PTTS responded to the original lawsuit. “We view this (Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association) suit as an attempt to restrict the recreational angler’s ability to fish with a piece of gear that has proven to be very effective in allowing the masses to catch tarpon in Boca Grande Pass, as well as an indirect assault on the PTTS.  The PTTS has always been conducted in a sporting manner with an emphasis on promoting conservation, the sport of tarpon fishing in Boca Grande, and the wonderful attributes the Boca Grande area offers to visitors,” commented Joe Mercurio, Vice President and General Manager of Tarpon Anglers Club, LLC.

The Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association not so respectfully disagrees.