Last week I decided to fish a place I haven’t fished in a while, the Tamoka Basin. I set out from the Highbridge boat ramp just before dawn to catch the early bite. I got into the basin and began to fly cast up toward the bank. After working along the bank for about an hour and having no success I motored toward a different area and what I found was a complete joy to me; snook and plenty of them. I came upon a creek mouth where the fish were blasting bait out of the water and on my first cast I landed a snook of about 15”. My 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th casts produced the same thing. I thought to myself “ this is going to be a wonderful day”.


As I was catching these smaller fish every so often you would see a big one bust bait. I put down the fly rod and picked up a spinning rod equipped with a 17MR Mirrolure and cast to a spot where a larger fish was chasing bait. After the lure hit the water I let it set for a couple of seconds then started to work the lure. On the second twitch it got slammed and the fish started pulling line off the reel. I knew when that happened that I had a good size snook on. After putting on a few good jumps I boated the fish, photographed and measured it (26”) and released it.

When I finally left the Basin my total fish for the day was 15 snook, 3 trout, 2 flounder and a redfish. By the way the flounder were also caught on the Mirrolure and they were 14” and 19”.

I returned to the same spot 2 days later and landed another 6 snook. The day after that I returned once again but found the fish not to be as cooperative as they were the day before. I was however able to land 4 more snook and a redfish.

After that second day of fishing I was running back to the boat ramp up the ICW when out of nowhere, about 25 ft. in front of my boat, a tarpon weighing about 150 lbs sky rocketed out of the water. With no time to react I thought the fish was going to land in my boat. Luckily for me the big fish reentered the water about 5 ft. in front of the boat. I had to stop the boat to catch my breath and ponder what would have happened if it did land in the boat. Who says fishing is not a dangerous sport?