Starting off his day during a beautiful Florida sunrise, John Skinner of John Skinner Fishing had no idea the fight that lay ahead of him as he headed out to fish for tarpon.
Epic battle with tarpon begins
Around the 8:30 minute mark in the video, Skinner hooks his first fish which flips through the air.
“You jump boy, you jump!” Skinner calls as the fish breaks through the surface of the water.
“I just turned the motor sideways— that’s to get the lower unit sideways to put more resistance on the fish when it drags the kayak,” Skinner explained after he hooked the massive fish. “This is what tires them out. I’ve done this numerous times. You can wear ‘em down pretty quick doing this.”
The fish hangs around Skinner’s kayak for a little while, close enough that Skinner can identify it as a tarpon, one of the most rewarding inshore catches for an angler. It isn’t until later in the video that the real battle begins.
At the 16:47 minute mark, the tarpon surfaces and crashes into the kayak.
“So I did get a leader touch. That’s worth something in the tarpon world,” Skinner says as the battle, a waiting game, continues.
An almost twenty battle yields success
A minute later the fish begins to tire and at the 21:40 minute mark Skinner finally gets a hand on the fish only to have the massive tarpon thrash and break free— it takes two hands for Skinner to haul the fish out of the water after an almost twenty minute fight with the fish.
Start to finish, it’s a total of 18 minutes and eight seconds from the time the tarpon hit to the time Skinner got his hand in the fish’s mouth, making for one epic battle with a fish.
So nice he put it back. Thanks