Boca Grand Tarpon Wad

They are still spear fishing for tarpon off Louisiana

Fly Life Magazine is calling out Hells Divers and their members who like to spear fish for tarpon off the coast of Louisiana.

As the comment thread in this 2008 post about the same issue illustrates, the spear fishing community will aggressively push back.

In what has to be one of the more ironic comments, given Save the Tarpon is getting involved, tarpon spear fishing advocate Louis Rossignol references the PTTS to call bullshit on those opposed to the practice.

For those that want to judge, take a look at that completely ridiculous circus they call the “Professional Tarpon Tournament Series”, where boats cram into the pass, live bait tarpon and feed half of them to the local hammerhead population. The ones that escape the big teeth get dragged over to a scale and then released, exhausted, to said hammerhead-infested pass.

In this video Rossignol,who owns 5 of the top ten Hells Divers tarpon spear fishing records, drills a triple digit tarpon off a gulf rig.

King of Kings

A celebration of fly fishing for tarpon from Florida to The Yucatan.

I want a girl with a shirt skirt and a long jacket

Four South Africans flyfishing for tarpon in the Florida Keys, jumping some big fish and losing most of them.

Silver Lining

From Captain Will Benson.

via: Way Upstream

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Tables Fish Protections

Florida state fishery rulemakers have thrown a plan to create rules for what's a game fish and what's a sport fish back into the water.

"They began changing things and making exceptions," said Tom McLaughlin, a Boca Grande charter fishing captain who supported the concept.

"It was a little rushed and got a little confusing.... Then it started to cave in on itself," said McLaughlin, a former Tavernier resident.

After more than two hours of testimony and discussion, FWC board members directed agency staff to "look into creating some type of parameters specifically for bonefish and tarpon," said FWC spokeswoman Amanda Nalley.

Concerns that other species, such as sea trout or permit, could wind up as designated sport fish or game fish apparently doomed the plan.

"This was entirely about permit," McLaughlin said. "Basically, the only opposition came from divers who spearfish out of the Tampa area. They organized and got about 20 to 25 divers to show up in Orlando."

The rule reaching the FWC would have created a recognized sport-fish designation applied to species so economically valuable to the recreational economy that only catch-and-release fishing would be allowed.

LINK (via: Keys Net)