Tarpon Fishing in Trinidad

by Jon Mattick
(Trinidad)

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I haven't really got a story as such, but I'm copy and pasting the email I sent to my UK Fishing buddies who I delight in regularly "rubbing it in" with regards to the quality and size of fish I catch out here.

Every time I go fishing in Trinidad I catch something different ? last weekend we fished small live-baits for Kingfish and Spanish Mackerel in shallow water in the Gulf of Paria, we only caught one Kingfish and a couple of Stingrays, but caught a load of big Ramoras ? all about 2 ft long ? I didn?t realize you could catch Ramoras, they are bizarre looking things and I wish I had photographed one now. I would like to have caught whatever it was there were supposed to be sucking onto. In addition we caught 3 small catfish about 10oz and 6 inches long, never caught these before either ? we kept them to use as live baits later.

At 3 o'clock we moved to the Dragons Mouth and float fished the live Catfish for Trinni Trout (Tarpon), the pictures are the end result.

This is the first three figure fish I have managed to get into the boat. Ee guesstimated it to be about 105lb - it was just over 6 ft long and 6 ft equals a 3 figure Tarpon - this fella was in good condition and quite thick so we were confident he was well over the 100 mark.

Unfortunately for the fish, this trip was a treat paid for by me for some of "My Gang", (pictured). Releasing this amount of "wild meat" is politically incorrect and unacceptable in the Lesser Antilles and I was out voted 6 - 1 on it's fate - I'm afraid it got the length of a 4x4 treatment, never the less it has fed 5 starving Trinni families, (we did catch another "small" 80 pounder that was allowed to get bigger).


For more information on Ramora Fish see this post on a blog called Strange Waters

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