Study calms dispute between Boca Grande anglers

Tarpon season is just around the corner, and with it will come the return of the controversy that has wracked Boca Grande Pass - or at least the skippers plying it during the May through July season - for some two decades.

In this massive cut through the barrier islands, some 80 miles south of Tampa, incredible numbers of silver kings gather prior to the move offshore to spawn; acoustic beam receivers placed in the bottom of the 72-foot-deep Lighthouse Hole have recorded up to 24,000 fish massed into the mile-long drift at times, almost certainly the most concentrated aggregation of tarpon on the planet.

Such an assemblage of giant fish - average weight close to 100 pounds, with many much larger - naturally draws a crowd of fishermen. At times more than a hundred boats swarm above the schools, sometimes drifting rail-to-rail, close enough to smell the barbecue sauce on the sandwich of the next boat over.

Not surprisingly, the intense competition for enormous cash rewards - some guides earn more than $30,000 a month by running two or more trips daily during prime time- results in conflicts.

The most serious and long-running has been that between the old-school live-bait fishermen, the traditionalists following a tactic that had been accepted for a hundred years at the pass, and guides who prefer to chase the fish with artificial jigs. Most of the live-baiters were from island families, while most of the jiggers were from other areas, Tampa being home to the majority.

The island guides soon began to charge that the jiggers were foul-hooking the majority of their fish. The jiggers countered that they were not, and that besides it's a free country where every angler should be allowed to fish as they wish.

However, the tactics that bring success to the jiggers - running to the densest masses of fish - interfere with the tactics essential to the live-baiters, which require long, unhindered drifts to keep their baits down where the fish feed.

The live baiters also charged that the jiggers were causing an unnecessary number of the fish to die due to their tackle and tactics. The island guides, having protected the goose that laid the golden egg years earlier by pushing through a high-priced tarpon kill tag that eliminated the old-time waste of these inedible fish, now felt that the newcomers were causing many fish to die of exhaustion - or more often to fall prey to the many enormous sharks that prowl the pass when the tarpon are there.

Enter one Kathy Guindon with the Fish & Wildlife Research Institute. Guindon's assignment, starting in 2003, was to get aboard the boats of both types of anglers, observe their success, tag their fish, and report the survival results.

But Guindon soon discovered that the distrust each side felt for the other extended to the FWRI.

"No matter what my findings, I knew somebody was going to be upset, but we had to stick to the science and let the chips fall where they would," said Guindon.

Using sonic tags and following fish that were caught and then released, Guindon found good news for both sides in the long run - but no evidence to support shutting anybody out of the fishery.

"We found that mortality is very low on released tarpon, about 5 percent from the gear and the fight, no matter if they were caught on live bait gear or jigging gear. If a fish was active at release, it survived. If it sank at release, that was it."

She said that sharks were a factor in survival at Boca Grande, however, taking an added 9 percent of released fish. But again, there seemed no statistical difference between the catch methods on survival.

"At first the fishermen who wanted the study to come out a particular way put pressure on us, but after a time I think most of them realized we were just out there impartially doing our jobs, and most began to support what we were doing," Guindon said.

For many fish, being caught didn't seem to have much impact, at all.

"Some of the fish went right back to the school within minutes of being released; we saw one feeding 90 minutes after it had been tagged. And then some went with the tide flow for a few miles while they recovered, but they would turn around then and come back to the pass, too," said Guindon. "In the end, we made both sides equally unhappy, and that's a common result of good science."

FWRI is now engaged in a genetic tracking study involving some 3,000 fish, with help from recreational anglers who take samples from released fish. For more on tarpon research - and to help out in genetic studies - visit the FWRI website at myfwc.com/research.