I met Captain Mark Noble at the Golden Isles Marina dock on St. Simon’s Island this particular Saturday. He had a party of two ready to do some tarpon fishing, and I was going along to find out how he does it and hopefully get some good photographs of the action. What I got was an expert education in tarpon fishing – Georgia style – and a much greater appreciation for the strength and stamina of these silver giants.
We left the marina in Captain Noble’s C-Hawk center console and rounded the south end of St. Simons Island in search of bait. The Brunswick shipping channel is clearly marked down the middle of the inlet, but you can run closer to the beach on the outside edge of the long sandbar. We hugged the edge of the bar and began heading north up the east coast of the island, about a mile off the beach.
We spotted several boats idling around with a single figure standing on the bow, a telltale sign that bait is in the area. Swinging around, we could see two of the figures heaving a cast net into the water.
The bait was pogies – menhaden shad – and Captain Noble showed us in short order, how to catch them. He idled into the school that was flipping on the surface. One heave with his ten foot cast net brought about 100 pogies into the boat. I thought they would last us all day.
But, Captain Noble had us take about twenty of the largest ones and put them in the huge live bait well. While we put the remaining eighty or so baits in a big ice chest, he threw again with the same result. Another twenty live ones and another eighty in the ice chest. We did this five times, and each time Captain Noble filled the boat with pogies. I watched the other boats making cast after cast coming up empty.
I use pogies regularly, and that first cast net load would have provided me enough bait for an entire day of fishing. What I didn’t realize was just how Captain Noble uses all these pogies.
Once we had fifty or so live baits and a cooler of dead baits, we buttoned down and ran south. We ran about two to three miles offshore, and had to work our way around some heavy ground swells that were breaking on numerous sandbars. Offshore of St Simons, Jekyll, and Cumberland Islands, sand bars come and go at the will of the sea.
We made the run to the red and green buoys marking the entrance channel to St Andrews Sound. The tide was coming in, and the current was noticeably strong along the edge of the channel. We anchored the boat along the edge and broke out the tackle. Four long boat rods were set up with fifty-pound class reels and fifty pound test line. A single 7/0 hook was tied to the end of a seven-foot, eighty-pound monofilament leader. On two of the rigs there were egg sinkers ahead of the leaders. The other two rigs were to be freelined.
A single live pogie went on one of the freelined rigs and another one went on one of the rigs with a sinker. A cut dead pogie went on each of the other two rigs. This gave us one live pogie swimming and one on the bottom. In addition it put one dead pogie freelining and one on the bottom. Four baits waited at the back of the boat for something to happen.
As soon as the rods were set, Captain Noble took out a bait board and began cutting up pogies from the ice chest. He chunked them up into two or three pieces and a small pile at a time went into the water. They drifted with the current away from the boat and into the baits we had waiting.
Captain Mark called this chumming “telephoning the fish”.
“It’s better than 1-800collect”, he said as he continued to cut dead pogies and get them into the line of bait.
