Capt. Nestor Alvisa
Charter HookedonFlamingo.com 786-387-2443
During March a lot of my clients come to Miami looking to catch some Tarpon. Miami offers a unique and a one of a kind nighttime tarpon fishery during the wintertime. We have a phenomenal shrimp run that’ll go on during our winter and into our springtime of the year.
These tarpon migrate into our waters to eat and fatten themselves before making their migration down to the keys to spawn. So, how do we target these fish? Several ways of targeting these fish are around our inlets, bridges, seawalls and dock lights. One of the more effective ways I find is to target these fish is around bridges.
These fish will swim between the bridge spans holding right on that shadow line created from the lights above the bridge waiting for the baitfish to get pushed into the bridge with the current. Using a trolling motor to keep your boat positioned like a Minnkota Terrova or Ulterra to keep you positioned in front of the bridge spans is the easiest way to fish for these fish on the bridges. As far as tackle that I’ll use for these fish will be anything between a medium, medium heavy to a heavy spinning rod and anything between a 5000 to 14000 size Daiwa reel.
I’ll match my gear to the size of the fish ill be targeting and how much drag we’d need to pull it out of the structure. I’ll have my reels rigged with 30-50lb braid, 30-50lb fluorocarbon leader and a 4/0-7/0 circle hook depending on the size of the bait I’m using and for bait we’ll be using live shrimp during this time of the year. Once you’ve positioned your boat up current of the bridge span you are fishing just cast your shrimp in front of the shadow line and let the current drag the shrimp in, wait for that big thump and hold on!
