A hundred pounds of chrome jumping eye-level with the boat. If you fish the Keys once in your life, spring tarpon is the fight to build the trip around.
Every spring the tarpon migration pushes through the Upper Keys, and Key Largo's channels, flats edges, and bridges load up with fish from 60 to well over 100 pounds. The bite is all about the tide, which is exactly where a captain who has fished this water since 1976 earns his keep.
Brian fishes them the local way: fresh live bait presented on the right stage of tide, in the lanes the fish actually swim. When a tarpon eats, the next ten seconds are the most spectacular thing in inshore fishing: greyhounding jumps, rattling gills, and a fight that can run the better part of an hour. Every tarpon is released boatside.
Tarpon lanes are tide-and-timing puzzles that take years to learn. Renting a boat and hoping is a donation; fishing them with a 100 Ton Master who grew up here is a plan.
The spring migration, roughly March through July, is prime, with resident fish around beyond it. May and June evenings are the classic windows.
No. Tarpon are a protected gamefish, fought boatside, photographed in the water, and released. The jumps are what you come for.
Yes. Brian coaches the whole fight, the gear does its share, and losing a tarpon mid-jump is still a better story than most fish you land.
Captain Key Largo and The Poppa Wahoo Collective are the same family, an island apart. Brian runs the flats and the backcountry out of Key Largo. The offshore fleet, two Hatteras sportfishers, works out of Islamorada 20 minutes south.