Fish had been hard to come by during our week as the full moon tides seemed to take a lot of the fish back offshore early in the week. They started to trickle back in over the latter part of our trip, but they hadn’t settled into a predictable routine – unless you consider random rolls and busts, predictable. There at the end, we found a group that was “chained-up”, churning water, and steadily rolling – we got the eat, the jump, and all was right with the world once again.

I have been fishing the Homosassa are with a small group of friends the last 5 years or so, every May or June. It is a storied and unique fishery that is briefly home to some of the largest Tarpon found in the USA every year during May and June. Author Monte Burke did a great job capturing the allure and history of this fishery in his 2020 novel called “Lords of the Fly.” Although the place and the fishery has changed much over the last 50 years, the Tarpon fishing here continues to draw me in, year after year.

Homosassa is not for the “faint of heart” or “curious” Tarpon fly angler. The fish here are transient and use the flats around Homosassa briefly along their annual migration to parts unknown. Somedays they are around and somedays they ae not – the only way to know is to go look and the best time to do that is in between late April and early July. Don’t waste your time after July 4^th or before Easter – they aren’t there. They are big – the average hooked fish is 130 pounds with 175-200 pounders readily available in just about every school of fish you encounter. There are BIG sharks – Hammerheads, Bulls, and Tigers – that move in with the schools of Tarpon so typical leaders have a breaking point of 16-20 pounds to make it easy to break the fish off when a shark starts getting after them during a long, drawn-out fight. Add clouds, afternoon thundershowers, tides, kelp, a concentration of other boats, and -of course – the wind to the mix and you should quickly realize why I started this paragraph (and ended) with - Homosassa is not for the “faint of heart”.

I’m happy to be home and back on the trout waters around Bozeman for the time being. The rivers here are just starting to come into shape as we are on the backend of the spring runoff. Its streamer fishing season right now, but the Salmonflies will be here soon enough. The Tarpon of Homosassa will be back in 2024, the rivers around Bozeman will be high and dirty then as well, and I’ll happily spend another week of my life, staring at water and looking for things that swim in it.