If you have never seen a tarpon bound from the surface while feeding on baitfish or striking a lure you need to.

    Few sights are more impressive and fortunately for Texas anglers there are many opportunities to target these “silver kings” and other acrobatic fish within short reach of our jetty systems.

    Tarpon are well within the reach of most anglers on the coast. They are present from Sabine Pass down to Padre Island in the near-shore Gulf. So, why do few anglers catch them?

    They are extremely finicky fish and will mysteriously choose to bite on seemingly nothing, and when they do, it is difficult to put a hook into them. Their mouths are full of very hard bone, and hookset is more difficult with them than any other species on the Gulf Coast. If you happen to hook one, be ready for a sweat-drenched, adrenaline-pumped battle.

    “We see tarpon around the Aransas Jetties a lot but they can be super hard to catch. Some times they want big live bait and sometimes super small artificials,” said Capt. Bobby Caskey of Shoal Grass Lodge.

    Tarpon are dogged fighters that use speed, acrobatic agility, and stamina to their advantage. Some fish will stay under the surface, causing anglers to suspect they have hooked something else, and then all of a sudden explode out of the water and snap the line.

    An angler’s best shot at catching a tarpon is fishing a live crab on a circle hook free-lined toward feeding fish or drifted over big schools of menhaden. With this setup, anglers should let the fish hook themselves instead of attempting a hookset.

    Once the fish is on, good luck and enjoy. A show of strength, agility and determination is about to begin.

    Tarpon are not the only acrobats in the near shore Gulf. Spinner and blacktip sharks leaping from water in amazing displays of agility and they are very common throughout the summer from the jetties to the oil rigs and everywhere in between.

    Spinners and blacktips often school together and feed in various parts of the water column. Shark savvy anglers know the smaller fish often focus on the upper part of the column, quickly taking chunks of chum and undersized fish thrown overboard. However, the bigger sharks operate somewhere in the mid range. Typically if they are in 50 feet of water, the big boys hang around 20-25 feet down.

    Most of the sharks you see free jumping are in the four to six foot range and that is because by staying down and being able to see what is going on above them, they have plenty of room to generate the kind of energy it takes to push a 150-pound body 10 feet out of the water.

    To draw in the big boys, it helps to create a sense of competition among the sharks. The most economical would be to take a five gallon bucket, punch it full of holes and put weights in the bottom. The bucket is tied to the boat with enough rope to sink at least 10 feet down and fill it with fish guts, old shrimp, cut menhaden or any kind of smelly stuff. This will create a chum slick that will draw in sharks from all around.

    The secret to getting the big boys up is take a pail of wet sand and live glass minnows or finger mullet. Take several of the baitfish, clump them up in the sand, and throw them overboard. The fish will escape at different depths and it will drive sharks crazy. The big ones will start surfacing you can skip the sand and just throw over the live bait to keep them up top. This is a modified version of what is called "power chumming" in Florida.

    Use large live bait like a hardtail or ladyfish to keep some of the smaller sharks from striking. Most of all brace yourself because when a six foot long spinner or blacktip blasts through a school of his competitors, it is coming for a fight.

Chester Moore, Jr. is the Port Arthur News Outdoors Editor. To contact Chester Moore, e-mail him at cmoore@fishgame.com. You can hear him on the radio Fridays from 6-7 p.m. on Newstalk AM 560 KLVI or online at www.klvi.com.