UTER
How to catch Tarpon
Tarpon feed in 74–90°F water and bite best at 78–86°F. Fish Scouter's season calendar follows them in 18 waters; in October they are at their peak in The Ten Thousand Islands & Everglades, Miami & Biscayne Bay, Palm Beach & the Treasure Coast.
About
The silver king. A hundred pounds of chrome that jumps six feet, migrates up both coasts in spring and stacks in the passes to spawn. The fish people fly to Florida for.
How to fish it
Find the schools rolling at dawn; get ahead of them, never on them. Bow to the jump. Circle hooks, 60–80 lb leader, and a long fight — or a short one if you can turn them.
What it eats
Live bait for it
Blue crabsWhole and small for permit and tarpon; halved or quartered on the bottom for black drum, redfish and cobia.
Threadfin herring (greenbacks)Nose-hooked on a circle hook and free-lined, or slow-trolled. Fragile — handle them wet and fast.
Pilchards (whitebait)Free-lined or under a cork, hooked through the nose on a #1 to 2/0 circle hook. The one bait that catches everything inshore.
Finger mulletLip-hooked on a 2/0 to 4/0 circle hook and free-lined, or on a fish-finder rig in the surf. Cut mullet on the bottom for redfish and drum.
PinfishHooked through the back ahead of the dorsal on a 2/0 to 4/0 circle hook; the small ones free-lined, the big ones on a fish-finder rig.What to fish it with
the sizes that fish itThe rule
checked September 2026Catch-and-release only; a $50 tarpon tag is required to possess one for a record; fish over 40" must stay in the water.
The current rule →Where it is, month by month
Tarpon live by one number: about 79°F. Satellite tags on nearly 300 fish over 18 years showed the adults ride the 26°C line up and down the coast like a conveyor belt. They winter in the warm water off south Florida, the Keys, Mexico and Cuba — plenty of residents stay in the Everglades rivers, the Keys basins and Miami's bridge lights all winter. In February and March the first migrants hit Biscayne and the Keys bridges; by April they're pushing through every Keys channel and up both Florida coasts. May and June are the heart of it — Boca Grande Pass stacked with thousands of fish on the hill tides, Homosassa's giants on the flats — and the spawn happens offshore from April into August, around the full and new moons. Bonefish & Tarpon Trust's acoustic tags show the fish mix in the Keys at spawning time and then split: one group runs the Atlantic side up past Jacksonville to Georgia, the Carolinas and as far as Virginia's Eastern Shore by midsummer; the other works the Gulf beaches — the Panhandle in late June and July — to the Mississippi Delta and on to Louisiana and Texas. Come September the fall mullet run drags them back down the Atlantic beaches, and the first real cold fronts in October and November send everyone south. Catch-and-release, big circle hooks, and keep the big ones in the water.