A Very Important Catch

By Rusty Dawdy

Tate with his
tarpon catch

On Aug. 13, angler Tate Fontenot caught a tarpon near Big Lake. Which led me to wonder, just how rare is this catch? I began reaching out to friends, posting on bulletin boards and Facebook sites.  “Does anyone know of any verified tarpon caught in the Calcasieu estuary in the last 25 or 30 years?”  

Thirteen years ago, angler Luke Beslin posted a grainy YouTube video of a 4-ft. tarpon he hooked while kayak fishing near the LNG turnaround. The video showed what was undeniably a large tarpon flopping acrobatically through the air with its large bucket mouth thrashing back and forth. Wham! Just like that, it was off. This video has become bigfoot lore for the Southwest Louisiana saltwater crowd.  Nobody doubts its validity, but it wasn’t a catch.  

Over and over, I’m told there are several caught here each year, but in a digital world full of cameras, verification is seemingly rare. At least 100 people reached out to me with stories but no pictures.  

Bradley Laningham caught two juveniles last winter under lights in Prien Lake. That makes sense, as tarpon mostly feed at night. Nobody doubts Laningham, but he has no pictures.

Cajun Phil Broussard knew of one caught about 10 years ago under the 210 Bridge, but he has no idea where the pictures are. Capt. Jeremy Waltrip hooked a big one near the old jetties a few years back, but he was unable to land the fish after several explosive jumps.

Southwest Louisiana used to have tarpon.
Lots of tarpon.
Cameron had a tarpon club and a tarpon tournament, and the local high school mascot is a tarpon. There was a panoramic picture that hung in the Southwest Louisiana Fishing Club that showed two men, a young girl and
dozens of tarpon ranging from 15 to 100 pounds hanging on a wall behind them. Sadly, that particular photo was lost during Hurricane Laura.

In addition to apparently being photo shy, tarpon are hard to find, harder to hook and nearly impossible to land. This, along with their majestic silver stature and impressive aerial exhibitions have made them the stuff obsessions are made of.

My personal obsession with tarpon began as a child watching Walker’s Cay Chronicles on ESPN. Host Flip Pallot and guest would pole a skiff stealthily through the Everglades or some pristine tropical flat, strategically placing a miniscule 1-in. fly on their target. Strip, strip, pause and then from nowhere the water would explode. Out thrust a 100-pound silver king thrashing side to side and slamming back down into a splash over and over. To make things more exciting, this was all captured with dual cameras on movie quality film and produced with cutting-edge techniques. You could see every drop of water fling in slow motion. Pallot’s haunting voice and understated coolness didn’t hurt, either. 

I was hooked on a drug. I grew up in Louisiana and was privileged to be born into an offshore fishing family, but I wanted tarpon. I am not alone in this obsession. Michelangelo painted a tarpon on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Jonah fresco.  Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and George H. W. Bush all fished for tarpon in Florida. Despite his physical limitations, Franklin D. Roosevelt fished for tarpon in Texas.  

Writers Ernest Hemingway, Zane Gray, Richard Brautigan, Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison all spent seasons of their lives obsessing over tarpon. The 1973 French documentary “Tarpon” captured the era of pursuit by the Key West writers. A relatively unknown Jimmy Buffet did the film soundtrack. This summer a new documentary was released about the 1973 documentary. A book called Mile Marker Zero by William McKeen came out last year; it chronicles the misadventures of these same 1970s authors and their friends during that particular time period.  

In 2020, New York Times bestselling author Monte Burke released a darkly humorous and beautiful tribute to the world record chasers of tarpon, titled Lords of the Fly (Madness, Obsession, and the Hunt for World-Record Tarpon). The pursuit of the silver king seems to be a time-honored tradition for anyone who wants to truly torture themselves.  

At some point, Walker’s Cay went off the air. I had seen a few deep-water tarpon schools out of SW Pass or Grand Isle and briefly pitched some baits their direction with no success.  

Once, I thought I saw a school in Lake Charles near Isle of Capri, but I convinced myself I was crazy.  Over time, my fishing pursuits switched to marlin and then sailfish. I chased tuna on light spin tackle.  I fished Venice, Grand Isle, Mexico and Costa Rica. Heck, I even once booked a trip to chase peacock bass in the Amazon.  Then, I started fly fishing for redfish. That’s when my tarpon fever reignited. Over the years, I’ve fished for tarpon out of Stock Island, Key West and Homosassa.  

I have never caught a tarpon. 

I am aware I could simply go to Boca Grande Pass and land one on a giant reel with braided line, but most of those fish immediately get eaten by sharks upon release. In a state where it’s illegal to take a tarpon out of the water, hundreds are killed each day. I want very little part of that. 

With a fishery as bountiful as ours, it probably makes no sense to drive to Florida, hire a guide and ultimately take a long and very expensive boat ride. 

Tarpon caught bv
B. W. Marston of Shreveport,
in the Calcasieu River,
2 miles north of Cameron,
in September 1931.

However, tarpon fishing is something completely different. During the most prestigious, “big money” tarpon tournaments of Florida, the best tarpon anglers in the world go days without seeing fish, and when they do, they must entice them to eat, keep them from throwing hooks while thrashing through the air, angle them to the boat using only 20 leader, and ultimately measure them on the side of a skiff.  

It’s a genuinely difficult feat, especially when you only get to fish one random vacation day here and one day there over a small handful of intermittent summer getaways.

Southwest Louisiana used to have tarpon. Lots of tarpon. Cameron had a tarpon club and a tarpon tournament, and the local high school mascot is a tarpon. 

There was a panoramic picture that hung in the Southwest Louisiana Fishing Club that showed two men, a young girl and dozens of tarpon ranging from 15 to 100 pounds hanging on a wall behind them. The inscription read:

To: SWLA Fishing Club

From: T-Boy McCall

1946.

Sadly, that particular photo was lost during Hurricane Laura. 

Port Author had a tarpon tournament, too; so did Galveston, and so did Vermillion. Then in roughly 1955, the tarpon disappeared. Some areas took a little longer. We held on a little longer than Texas. A few tarpon were caught occasionally in the 1960s and ‘70s, but for all effective purposes, the upper gulf coast tarpon were gone and thought to be fished out, not for food but for sport. (Tarpon cannot be eaten because of small bones throughout the meat). At that time, our habitat had changed greatly, too.  Calcasieu ship channel was getting deeper and now contained major industries. The rice fields that fed the Mermentau were now using chemical fertilizers — 1950s chemical fertilizers.  The idea of using settling ponds was not even on our radar at the time.  Definitely not here. 

Similar industrialization was happening along the entire U.S. Gulf Coast.  The once great and mighty gulf tarpon was reduced to a cautionary tale of an unmanaged fishery.

Screenshot

By the early 1980s, Florida’s tarpon population had begun to suffer, as well. Their problem wasn’t overfishing; it was more likely a lack of fresh water. Florida’s once wild ecosystem couldn’t handle the state’s rapidly growing population. The swamp that was once Orlando exploded overnight.  Central state runoff was supposed to flow South to Okeechobee and then feed the Everglades with fresh water. This created an important nursery for many fish species, including tarpon. 

The sugarcane barons began commandeering what little water the Everglades had left. Okeechobee’s drainage was stopped and the water allowed to putrefy with algae. The once prolific springs of their nature coast, which pumped up to 8 million gallons of pristine water into the gulf daily, were now being used to water dozens of golf courses and service their region’s own population explosion.  

Even the Miami area grew from roughly 250,000 people in the 1950s to 3.5 million overnight. I can’t imagine

pogie bycatch and the collateral damage caused by this industry.  

Louisiana has no cap limit on how much menhaden can be harvested a year. Currently, the reported numbers are 1 billion pounds annually, or almost twice the amount of resources that Louisiana commercial fisherman and Louisiana recreational fishermen harvest from the Gulf of Mexico combined. 

Each year 300 million pounds of pogie are removed from Breton Sound alone. That’s more than the combined harvest of the entire Eastern Seaboard of North America from Canada to Florida.  

Although important to our fisheries, this article is not about bycatch, shoreline damage or fish spills. It’s about tarpon.

BTT studies, telemetry projects and mapping show that the Louisiana pogie harvest, specifically in Breton Sound, greatly disrupts the feeding, migration, breeding and comingling of tarpon. 

Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries claims their only concern is the sustainability of the actual Menhaden population, not any tangential effects. Because, for the time being, the pogie as a species can withstand the billion-pound annual harvest, it’s allowed.  

Under its current directive, LDWF doesn’t consider the other species which may be suffering by removing 1 billion pounds of the gulf’s largest food source.  For example, how many speckled trout, crabs, shrimp, shad or redfish get eaten to replace a porpoise’s 20-pound-a-day pogie diet? How many commercially valuable fish die or leave Louisiana because of this great reduction of food?  How many red snapper get eaten by sharks because there is little other food?  

Because all these metrics are, by their very nature, unquantifiable, these assertions aren’t used in decision making.  This is despite most believing them to be self-evident and obvious. 

After decades of trying to get much-needed change, advocates from the TRCP, Audubon Society, CCA, recreational fishermen and environmental groups finally got a small victory. One too many fish spills led LDWF to finally enact a very small buffer off the Louisiana coast.

It’s minimal, only a half-mile in most places, and there is still no cap for maximum harvest — still the most lenient restrictions in the country. But effective April 15, 2024, Louisiana had a buff

the problems it would have caused if our four-parish area blew up like that from 1955 to 1985.

Florida tarpon was and is big business. Even in its weakened state, Florida’s tarpon revenue alone accounts for an estimated $1 billion economic impact annually. In 1997, the Bonefish Tarpon Trust, or BTT, was founded. The main objective was to get the research they needed ASAP to try to circumvent the decline of this financially viable species. They promoted their agenda with their own TV show. Celebrity anglers joined flyfishing legends on adventures from the Bahamas to Cuba and beloved Florida. Public figures like Tom Brokaw, Huey Lewis, Michael Keaton, Jim Belushi and even cultural icons like Ivan Chouinard (founder of Patagonia) fished alongside the pioneers of saltwater flyfishing. The show not only raised awareness, it raised money — lots of money.  

The studies began quickly, and then they expanded well beyond Florida. BTT was able to influence fishery management in the Bahamas. Then they convinced Cuba to ban certain nets by showing them the economic tourism impact of catching a fish multiple times is much greater than the one-time value of harvesting a fish. 

The main “takeaways” of these studies was that tarpon were migratory. Two groups covered the Gulf Coast from different directs and the comingled. Our tarpon are Florida’s tarpon, so are Texas’ and so are Mexico’s. They hadn’t been fished out. Instead, their migration pattern had been interrupted. This mystery brought us back to what else was happening in 1955.

Since the late 1800s, menhaden harvest had been a growing business. Menhaden, also known as pogie, are a small, oily baitfish the size of your hand, first used as fertilizer and in high protein feeds. The oil was used in perfumes, soaps and various other applications. Today it’s used primarily in fish oil supplements, fish food and cat foods. Pogie is the Gulf of Mexico’s number one food source. After WWII, access to well-trained pilots and long-range communications led to the implementation of aircraft in the pogie harvest. The plane would locate schools and give the heading, and boats would go out there and net them. Somewhere about this time, the pogie boats switched from trawl nets, like shrimp boats, to a much more effective and deadly method called purse-seining.  A seine net is stretched out for miles surrounding a school, then it is cinched like a purse, collecting all the pogie inside, as well as anything else that was feeding on the menhaden. Accurate harvesting numbers from the 40s and 50s were not documented, but the number of boats and processing facilities were thought to expand tenfold.  

Tarpon catch
off the
Cameron
coast

Decades prior to the known tarpon correlation, many of our area’s old-time captains like Capt. Jep Turner of the Gulf Queen and Capt. Louis Vallee of the Guppy warned how the pogie harvest was decimating other species, primarily pelagic feeders. 

The problem only got worse with technology. Nylon nets, hydraulic power blocks, fish pumps and carrier vessels greater than 150 ft. in length turned pogie acquisition into a highly efficient endeavor. 

Important Facts To 

Understand About

The Pogie Industry

Due to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, pogie are not federally regulated, because it is not harvested to be consumed by humans. Therefore, it is not a “seafood” fishery it is an “industry” fishery, which falls solely under the purview of each state’s fisheries management, not NOAA.  

Most other states in the U.S. have effectively banned or greatly minimized menhaden harvest in their waters. The notable outliers are Virginia and Louisiana. However, the Virginia Legislature is on the verge of severely hampering harvesting in their state, as well. States in Mexico have stricter regulations than Louisiana. Due to adverse effects, underdeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and across the globe have banned this industry in their waters.

Over the years, The New Orleans Times Picayune, Louisiana Sportsman and the Houston Chronical have published scathing editorials about the problems ofer zone. Maybe that buffer is just wide enough to allow a few tarpon through to complete the migration loop. 

When Texas effectively kicked the pogie industry out their tarpon started showing back up quickly. 

Maybe Tate’s catch represents a new beginning for SWLA. Maybe it’s the first of many. Maybe we’ll soon have more accidental catches of tarpon in Big Lake. Maybe one day Louisiana’s regulations will catch up to the rest of the country’s. Maybe our grandchildren can have tarpon again.  

Maybe this truly is a very important catch.