Friday (Tuesday) Fish Fry – Tarpon Before the Storm
The delayed Friday Fish Fry from last week: “Tarpon Before the Storm.” This is a quick snap-shot of me videotaping a tarpon release in the northern Yucatan. Not long after this was taken, we realized that our 45-minute trip back to town had been bisected by the leading edge of a huge thunderstorm complex.
The first boat in our group ran the gauntlet before things got really bad, but the boat my father and I were in had to re-fuel before we could rev up. Within minutes of heading out we plowed right into a white, vertical wall of water, punctuated by lightning close enough to warm the air momentarily.
There have been a number times in my life when I’ve genuinely felt that I was in danger of being hit by lightning while fishing. This episode quickly moved to number one on that list! At one point, our guide had to stop the boat because the GPS went out and we literally couldn’t see more than a few dozen yards in any direction. Just sitting like that, on open water, under a storm of that magnitude, was one of the least enjoyable experiences of my life.
Without going into the rest of the story here, we did manage to get back to town, just in time for the rain and lightning to rev up yet another notch. By the next morning, though, the storm system had moved off and the tarpon were back in the shallows once again (and they were hungry).
