Close Quarters: How to Catch Tarpon in Thick Cover

March 20, 2025 By: Kubie Brown

The author shows off a Belize tarpon found cruising the outside edge of a mangrove forest. Photos courtesy Kubie Brown

There’s something magical about tarpon. From the way that they roll in the waves, to the way they stare knowingly at you when you’re getting ready to release them, everything about a tarpon is enchanting and even inspiring. Tens of thousands of words have been written about these majestic fish, and Megalops atlanticus has been a muse for writers like Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas McGuane. Michelangelo even painted a tarpon as the fish that devoured Jonah in his painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In short, the tarpon is more than just a fish—it’s an obsession.

Fly anglers dream about hunting monster tarpon on open flats and along sandy beaches. We envision seeing them gliding across the sand like wraiths, knowing they’re coming to smash our flies and perhaps even snatch our souls. However, it doesn’t always happen like we imagine it. Sometimes, the tarpon we dream of aren’t out swimming in the open but are holding close to cover, such as boat docks and bridge pilings, or hiding in shallow, mangrove-choked lagoons where they’re hard to spot and even harder to land. Yet, it doesn’t mean they’re out of your reach; you’ve just got to leave your open-sea tarpon fantasies behind and go after the fish where they live.

Big Gear and Small Flies

When you’re chasing tarpon in cover, make sure your rig offers enough stopping power. I’ve hooked tarpon around bridges in Florida and in the middle of mangrove jungles in Belize, and every time I hooked one the first thing the fish did was run right for the snaggy stuff. To land a tarpon in these conditions, you need to stop them from dragging your leader across the nearest cover or structure and breaking off. And that requires some heavy-duty gear.

A good tarpon setup—such as this one from Salt Fly Pro—requires a stout rod, a reel with a powerful drag, and a leader that can take a beating.

Whether you’re fishing for giant 100-pounders or baby 30-pounders, tarpon of all sizes fight well above their weight class, so you’ll need a rod with some backbone to keep them under control. A 10-weight rod is the minimum, but you won’t be over gunned with an 11-weight or even a 12-weight. When scrapping with tarpon near cover, you should always hold your rod low and only use it only to guide the fish. Because no matter how large a rod you’re using, if you put a lot of pressure on the fish with your rod in the air, it’s going to snap like a twig. This means you’ll have to fight the fish on the reel, so you’ll need a good one that’s up to the task.

Landing a tarpon in thick cover requires a fly reel with a smooth and powerful drag system that you can lock down tighter than a pickle jar lid. In addition, use a heavy, fluorocarbon leader in the 50- to 80-pound range that’s abrasion-resistant and can stand up to tarpon-powered tension.

While your standard Tarpon Bunny and Tarpon Toad flies will catch a cover-hugging tarpon or two, you’ll often have better luck with smaller flies. Tarpon holding near cover are looking for schools of small baitfish, petite crabs, and other diminutive forage, so it’s a good idea to bring along flies that will “match the hatch.” Baitfish patterns like Clouser Minnows and small Deceivers are great for targeting tarpon in the thick stuff, and crab and shrimp flies and even bass poppers can also be surprisingly effective. However, make sure to tie or purchase these smaller flies with extra-strong hooks, so that they won’t bend when hooked into a rampaging tarpon.

Trench Warfare

Finding tarpon in cover can be challenging. Even a gigantic tarpon can be surprisingly hard to see when it’s tucked in mangrove swamps or hugging close to a bridge piling or dock. It helps to search for fish in the early morning or evening, when they are actively feeding and rolling on the surface, and then following the beast back to its lair by targeting the closest cover you can find.

Spotting tarpon in cover can be difficult, and your casts must be accurate to get the fly in front of the fish in a tight spot.

Once you find a likely piece of structure where tarpon may be hiding, stalk it slowly. Poling in a boat or walking along the shore, make your way along the outer edges of cover, paying extra attention to any sudden depth changes or gaps you see leading to open water. This is where you’re most likely to see a fish. Once you spot a tarpon either holding or cruising by, position yourself so you can cast well in front of it and then strip your fly so that it will cross about 2 to 4 feet in front of the tarpon’s nose. Keep your stripping pace constant, without speeding up or slowing down, even when the fish reacts explosively, and then strip-set hard as soon you see or feel the tarpon inhale the fly.

As soon as you’re hooked into a tarpon in tight cover, job number one is to stop it. Lock your fingers down hard on any excess line in your hands and then get the slack onto the reel. If you can, try to smoothly pull the fish away from the cover while you do this, either by poling your boat out or by wading into deeper water. Once the fish is on the reel, crank down your drag and don’t give the fish an inch. Point your rod tip directly at the tarpon and reel in as much line as you can, changing angles to confuse the fish and keep it off balance. Take the fight to it, so the fish will tire quickly. While you may break a few off this way, if you remain patient and keep battling into the later rounds, you’ll bring more than a few tarpon to hand.

Even smaller tarpon can be a real challenge when you’re fishing close to cover.

The Silver King

Tarpon have a way of taking hold of you and getting under your skin, so that they become more than just a fish but symbols of the sea itself. Once you start fishing for tarpon, they become something you think about every time you see or smell the ocean, or even when you just turn on the wave sounds on your white noise machine before bed. For tarpon are a fish to be dreamed about and when you know how to catch tarpon in tight cover as well as open water, you can sleep more soundly. You’ll wake up each day knowing that the magic of tarpon is out there hiding beneath the waves, just waiting for you to find it.