Tampa Tarpon Report is the Tampa Bay area's tarpon fishing headquarters 1855 FLA-TARPON. TTR provides tarpon fishing reports, facts, tips, hot-spots ,tarpon fishing charters and tarpon tournament news  to Tampa Bay, St Petersburg and Boca Grande tarpon anglers. Get up to date tarpon fishing reports, tournament results and postings from South West Florida, the Tarpon fishing capital of the world!

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Today, of course, all interested parties are fully aware that hundreds of hundred-pound tarpon have been conquered by fly casters. The feat is no longer looked upon as a particularly big deal, except by those accomplishing it for the first time.

Meanwhile, the flyrod record has been pushed to 188 pounds, and when that first 200-pound tarpon finally does hit the scales, ab­solutely nobody will be astonished to hear of it.

So why is an angling feat that was once deemed virtually impossible now so com­monplace? Experience is only a small part of the answer. Many light-tackle fisher­men in the fifties were practiced enough and skillful enough to handle huge fish on the flimsiest of gear. Numerous 100-pound-plus tarpon had been taken on baitcasting (plug) tackle, and the record in that category, set in 1950, weighed a whopping 160 1/2 pounds.

Improvements in fly tackle, then?

Nope, not that either. True, today’s ded­icated chasers of tarpon are armed with tackle that Izaak Walton would scarcely recognize as fly-tossing equipment—high-modulus graphite or glass-composite rods; machined reels with infinitely adjustable drags as smooth as a baby’s bottom; rotproof flylines and backing lines of space-age design and materials. Such niceties now make the job much easier, but they did not bring about the breaking of the hundred-pound barrier; for the most part, they resulted from it.

Here’s the answer, plain and simple: Just as a common stone proved the key to David’s undoing of the Biblical giant Goliath, it was nothing more than a foot-long piece of thick monofilament line—a heavy shock tippet—that made it possible, at long last, for a flyrodder to duel a giant tarpon with real hope of success. Not un­til 1955 were flyfishing rules amended to allow the heavy tippet to be added right next to the fly, after which comes the light “class” leader. Before that, the fly had to be tied directly to a leader or tippet that tested no more than 12 pounds.

In the 1950s, tarpon fishing on Florida Bay was a lonely game, with few players.

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PTTS - Professional Tarpon Tournament Series