Guanaja Student Project: Day 3 by Carson Spencer
It’s our third day down in Guanaja, and I have been dying to catch a tarpon. Alec and I set out on a mission today… and by god we were going to catch one! We woke up at 5:30 this morning to get an early start on the day, and gathered all our rods and lures. We were pretty tired from all the great fishing we had been doing all the previous days and all the late night shark battles, but we both had our hearts set on catching a huge tarpon today. We hopped in our boat and set out to the river mouth, which we were told was the hot spot the day before. On our way over, we made a pit stop in this big ocean canal with a bunch of mangroves on the side which tarpon love to hang out by, just to throw our lines in the water and see what we could come up with. We fished all the way down and finally at the very end of the canal we spotted some rolling tarpon. Alec and I almost fell out of boat because we were so excited and knew that this very well could be the day we catch one of these devils. I let alec have the first few casts because that’s just what kind of friend I am… and to my luck, he hooked what looked like to be a 90 to 100 pound tarpon. He was having the battle of a life time, and let me tell ya, he was lovin it! This Tarpon was exactly what we were hoping for. It came up about 15 feet from our boat and flew about 4 feet clear out of the water. Looking at the view behind Alec and the fish reminded me alot of moby dick. What really killed all the excitement was when the tarpon just spit the lure out of its mouth in mid air… then swam away mocking us. At that point we were dissapointed but that was such a crazy experience to see such a huge fish fly out of the water so close to our boat and put up such a good fight. We carried on with our tarpon expedition for the remainder of the morning and finally got to the river mouth. We hooked about 4 this morning but never could fully land one. Mark my words though… tomorow is a whole new day.
We headed back to our key and had a fantastic lunch with all the boys. Then we set out to go spear fishing for lion fish yet again down on a new reef. What was so cool about the place we went too today was it was about 30 feet deep all around and all of a sudden there was this giant drop off that just turned into open water. It was a great place to snorkle. We shot a few lion fish, explored all around the reef with no limits or boundaries and were just livin the good life. Once we were all tired out from slaying so many lion fish, we headed back to another relaxing evening on our island. We fished a school of bonefish until the sun set and then lay in the hammocks watching the sun go down. Then comes my favorite part of the entire day. When I hear “dinner is ready!” come from the kitchen and we all gather at the table and swop our funny stories about what happened to us throughout the day. Although I didnt catch my Tarpon today like I wanted, I can always count on one thing… tomorow is always a new day, and Ive got plenty of time left in paradise. A tarpon will be mine!
