Florida Tarpon Charters

PTTS Week 1 Winning Pattern
Team Raymarc.net Wins First PTTS Event

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Was anyone surprised when Team Raymarc.net, captained by pro redfish and tarpon angler Artie Price, won the first Miller High Life Professional Tarpon Tournament Series (PTTS) event of the season?

If anyone was, it was Price. "It's nice to finally win one off the start," he said. "Usually we come from 200 to 300 points behind be the team of the year. It's nice to have a lead, and I'm curious to see how we do the rest of the year. We'll try to make three in a row." (He's referring to the fact that his team won the Yamaha Team of the Year (TOY) points race in 2005 and 2006 –Ed.)

What's different about this year? In other words: Why the week 1 victory – did his team make a change?

Not really. The weather changed in their favor.

"We usually have a slow start because I'm hard-headed," he said. "I like to fish heavy line. We fish at least 50- to 100-pound-test line, and usually the water's clear" in the Boca Grand Pass at the beginning of the PTTS season. "But we had a bad storm two nights before the tournament and it dirtied up the water."

He had planned on fishing lighter line this year at the start of the season, but thanks to the rain he didn't have to.

Practice: Every Day

"You have to get out here (on the Pass) every day to pay attention to what the water clarity is doing, the cloud cover, the sun," Price said. "All that makes a difference to what baits and line sizes we use."

In other words, Price is out on the Pass every day he can be during the season. That's his practice.

He can't guide because two of the other three members of his team – Brian Hart and Mike Whitfoth – are active guides and PTTS allows a maximum of two per boat (Scott Hart is the fourth person on Team Raymarc.net).

Price said: "I'm out here every day. Basically I'm paying attention to the water clarity and using dippin' dyes. I'm playing with colors of baits – tinting transparent baits different colors. And I'm seeing how many fish are inside or outside of the Pass. Fish move during the day at different times."

Competition: Followed the Fish

PTTS tournaments are the shortest tournaments in professional fishing: one 3-hour day of competition. That's it. For this event it was lines in the water at 7:00 and out at 10:00 unless you had a fish on.

It's as basic as finding fish on the depthfinder and dropping down a bait down in front of them.

But with only 3 hours, you better fish hard, and smart. Team Raymarc.net did exactly that.

They had no bites until a little more than halfway into the tournament, but "weren't worried," Price said. "It's happened a lot of times. And a lot of tournaments are actually won in overtime. A lot of times 10 fish are on in the last 10 minutes of the tournament. You hook up 2 minutes before the tournament stops."

Right about halfway through the 3-hour fishing day, they noticed that the fish had slipped to the outside, he said. "The fish were mainly inside, right at Gasparilla Island in the pass itself, and actually slipped to the outside halfway through the tournament. Only two other boats saw them go out there, and that's where we caught the winning fish" – which weighed 160 pounds.

After fighting, weighing and releasing the fish, they had 40 minutes left to fish. They managed to hook one more, but it pulled off and that was it.

The closest fish to theirs was a 148-pounder weighed by Team Paradise Pools.

> How did they know that the fish had moved? Price: "You can see them rolling on the top now and then. They will show you sometimes where the fish are, underneath them."

Winning Presentation

Some details:

• They were fishing in 45 to 80 feet of water. Price: "Dirty water was the key. That let us fish the heavier line."
• "When it hits the bottom, come up one crank and just hold it. You don't want to jig it. The current moves the bait. The stiller you can hold it, the better off you are."
• "When you see a fish on the recorder, go uptide and back down. You're constantly in reverse against the tide. Keeping your line vertical is the main thing in the pass."
• "A lot of times the fish are suspended, but that's not what you want. You want them on the bottom."
• When a fish bites, "crank, don't yank."
• "Being versatile out there with baits is a big deal. Learning what sunlight does to the baits, and what fish can and can't see at different depths, is a big issue."

Winning Gear

> Rod – 7' All Star rod. Price: "It's a custom rod rated for 30- to 80-pound line."

> Reel – Accurist 870 twin drag. "Good equipment is a key thing, and having drags on both sides of the reel give you a super-smooth drag."

> Line – 50-pound Berkley Big Game (clear)

> Leader – 100-pound Berkley Vanish fluorocarbon

> Terminal Tackle – 6-ounce homemade weight and a 9/0 Daiichi Chunk Light circle hook. "It's a light hook, but it holds up real well. Other hooks are a bigger diameter and harder to drive."

> Bait – 4-inch Berkley PowerBait Shiner in rootbeer gold. "They don't make them anymore. They haven't made them in 8 years, but it works and it's something nobody else has."

Winning Rig

They used Brian Hart's boat:

> Boat – 2300 Bay Ranger

> Motor – 4-stroke Yamaha 250

> Trolling Motor – Minn Kota Rip Tide 101

> Electronics – Humminbird 997

> Other – Power Pole, Bob's Jackplate ("It's a good deal. If it's rough, you can run your motor all the way down.")

> Wrap – Raymarc.net (computer consulting)

Main Factor In Their Success

> Price – "Probably a good team. We all work well together. I fight all the fish, Brian drives, Scott is a good hook and Mike is a good muscle guy." Muscle guy? "We don't use the drag when fighting fish, so they come to the boat really green. When they get there, Mike doesn't let them go."

Performance Edge

> Price – "The Humminbird. Without it, you couldn't see them and would never catch them. And mounting the transducer in the proper location (under the seat)."

Notable

> The PTTS is a 6-week series in Boca Grande Pass that culminates in a championship. For more info, click here to go to the Professional Tarpon Tournament Series website.

> Team Raymarc.net won a Century 2102 Bay Boat powered by a Yamaha F150 motor, loaded with G. Loomis Pass rods and a Continental aluminum trailer. The package is valued at $35,000.

'Need 1 More Trophy'
Price and Team Win 3rd Consecutive TOY Title

Friday, June 22, 2007

Last weekend Artie Price and the rest of team Raymarc.net – Capt. Brian Hart, Capt. Mike Whitfoth and Scott Hart – won the 2007 Professional Tarpon Tournament Series Team of the Year (TOY) points championship. But that's kind of a matter-of-fact way of saying that they smoked the other boats: They beat this year's TOY runner-up by more than 400 points – and only 35 points separated 2nd and 3rd, and only 2 points were between 3rd and 4th.

If that wasn't enough, this is their third consecutive PTTS points win – and the PTTS has only been around a year longer than that. So how does this utter dominance feel?

"It feels good," Price said. "I think we need to win one more so all four of us have a trophy (laughs). There's only one trophy per team, which kind of stinks." Who has the ones they've already won? "Everybody else. I'm the one (without one) – yet."

What It Takes

Boca Grande Pass isn't that big – not like the huge expanse of water fished in a typical redfish tournament. And everyone fishes for tarpon in the Pass the same way: drop a soft-plastic tail on 4- to 6-ounce jighead rigs, straight down to the bottom.

So what makes Price and team so good? He ticked off a few items:

1. A Good, Versatile Team

"I think the main key is the team," he said. "We have a real good team." Price, Brian Hart and Whitfoth have been fishing tarpon together for 6 or 7 years, and Scott Hart has been on the team for 4 years. So "everyone knows their own job."

The Hart brothers drive, Price fights the fish and Whitfoth grabs the fish at the boat – "but we switch around," Price said. "We have four guys who can drive the boat and four guys who can fish. Most teams have a designated driver and fishermen, but we're more versatile."

That's important because "some days you can have a bad day. It's not every day you can hook fish. If I'm having a bad day, I'm (going) behind the wheel. It kind of gives you an advantage if you can switch."

2. A Quick Fight

"In tournaments a lot of people take a long time to fight the fish," Price said. "But I'd rather break one off than let it get hung in the bottom debris or let a shark eat it. We get a fish to the boat in 15 minutes. If it's longer than that, it's way too long." That's a big statement when most boats take at least an hour to land a big fish.

A quick fight means you can get more releases, and each one is 50 points, he noted. Quicker fights also mean "more opportunities to hook fish when they're biting. Some guys will fight a fish for 2 hours and it's only a 3-hour tournament."

How do you horse a 150-plus-pound tarpon in quickly? "Years on the rod – knowing when to pull and when not to pull," Price said.

"Everyone uses (reel) drag," he added. "I (typically) don't – I use my thumb. Strike mode (on the reels) is 6 to 7 pounds, and I never really take it off that. I can feel when a fish isn't running, when it's just dead weight. When it's like that, I lock the reel up. I might be putting 100 pounds (of pressure) on it.

"You're just raising the weight of the fish in the water column, and by bringing it up so quick, I think it gets disoriented.

"Plus we have this stocky guy with arms as big around as my leg (Mike Whitfoth), and when I bring (a fish) to the boat it's his job to grab it and not let go."

3. Lots of Rods

With just three rods allowed to be fished at any one time, "most guys have four to six rods and reels," Price said. "But when you look in our boat we have 18 rods and reels – so if we break off a fish or break off in the bottom debris, we just throw the rod in the bottom of the boat and go."

This lets his team spend more time with baits in the water, always a prerequisite to doing well in tournaments, and allows them to have different jigheads rigged up. "It just maximizes your efforts, which is a big deal," he noted.

He also mentioned that the drags of some teams' reels get hot, which can cause people to lose fish without realizing why. "You can watch the rod tip – a sudden jerk and stop, jerk and stop."

He uses Accurate twin-drag reels. He explains the advantage of those reels this way: "Would you put brakes just on one side of your car?"

4. Experiment

When it comes to baits, some PTTS teams like to stay with tried and true or "old faithful" lures. Not Price.

His team pours its own lead-heads, and colors them red, chartreuse and a color Price calls "disco ball" (gold flake).

He also experiments a lot with dipping dyes to tint baits. "I have 80-some different colors (of dyes)," he said. "I think fish see tints of colors, not the colors themselves."

He added: "A lot of times you can come up with a bait that fools numbers of fish or one that fools big fish. The last couple years I haven't been able to come up with a bait that pulls big fish."

Going for Four

Next year, he and his team will be gunning for their fourth TOY points championship in a row. But he noted that the competition "gets tougher every year."

He said "there's a lot of luck" in doing well in a PTTS event, which isn't something anyone can count on, but which might help another team here and there. Still, the rest of the field is going to have to figure out some way to get at least 400 points more than they did this year.

Notable

> Another advantage he feels he has is mounting his transducer toward the middle of the boat. "The transducer we're using is actually right underneath the console, not off the back. If you have it mounted back by the motor, every time you hit reverse you blow the screen out. That's a no-no because then you can't see your fish."

> This year they went to the PTTS-mandated minimum 40-pound line exclusively (his team uses Berkley Vanish fluorocarbon for both mainline and leader), with a 100-pound leader. He said: "We usually run 50 and 100, but dropped to 40 and 100 because the water was so clear (this year)."

> Leader length is "only about 24 inches, just enough to get away from that gill plate and that head. I like a shorter leader. I think you get more bites. When you're dropping through schools of fish 30 to 40 feet thick, it doesn't spook the fish as bad."

> For rods, his team uses custom-made 7-foot All Stars, rated for 30 to 80 pounds. "It has a soft tip and a lot of backbone," he said. "You can actually grab the end of this rod, and someone can pull you off the floor with it and not break it."

> For its TOY win, Team Raymarc.net won a Yamaha F250 4-stroke outboard. Runners-up Team Century/Florida Fishing Weekly/Reel Appeal won a trip for four to Crocodile Bay Lodge in Costa Rica.

Record Tarpon At Boca Grande?

By: FRANK SARGEANT fsargean@tampabay.rr.com

Published: Jun 25, 2004

What might have been the largest tarpon ever caught anywhere in the world was released by captain Brian Hart and angler Scott Kenney about two weeks ago at Boca Grande Pass.

The massive fish, which Kenney photographed at boat side, taped 92 inches long and had a girth of 49 inches. Based on the standard formula for estimating tarpon weights - length times girth squared divided by 800 - the least the fish could have weighed is 276.1 pounds. But tarpon experts agree that the formula underestimates for fish more than 180 pounds by a factor of about 10 percent.

Giving Kenney's fish that extra 10 percent, it might have exceeded 300 pounds. Unfortunately, no one will ever know because the anglers quickly decided to release the tarpon, rather than kill it for the weigh- in that an official record requires.

The catch and measuring were witnessed by a biologist from the Florida Marine Research Institute, who was aboard to observe tarpon jigging tactics.

Kenney hooked the fish at about 7 a.m. on a breakaway jig fished just off bottom in the 72-foot-deep Lighthouse Hole. He said the fight was unusually short, especially considering the size of the fish. The biologist timed it at 22 minutes.

"We had a bull shark about 9 feet long come up under the fish at the boat,'' Hart said, "and I think the tarpon was just too big for the shark to try to eat. It just faded away.''

Kenney, of Aurora, Ohio, said the fish swam off seemingly none the worse for wear. He said after the release he wished they had taken a scale for the biologist to use in determining the fish's age, but the important thing seemed to be to release the fish alive.

The typical fish boated at Boca Grande used to be around 80 pounds, but these days it is closer to 100.

Tournament-winning weights have risen about 40 pounds in the past decade, from a historic average around 110 to a present weight of close to 150 in many events.

Two years ago, captain Rob McCue and his angler taped another Boca Grande monster that was 90 inches long and had a girth of 46.5 inches. Its weight was estimated at somewhere more than 250 pounds, and it also was released.

Several fish in the 230- to 250-pound class have been landed in Tampa Bay in the past two years, including a 223-pounder that was weighed in at the Suncoast Tarpon Roundup in 2002.

Though Hart and Kenney won't be able to claim the record, odds appear to be very good that someone along Florida's southwest coast is going to set a world mark within the next year or two.