The prospect of Season 2 Silver Kings has my blood pumping! I've been spending some time on theses blown out days doing a little reading, and since this thread is the one-stop-shop for all things tarpon here's a little book review mixed in with some history and personal note.
On the suggestion of a fellow Ag recently I purchased and read "Fishing Yesterday's Gulf Coast" by Barney Farley. I purchased the digital download from
Amazon. Because the stories contained are completely intertwined with tarpon fishing in Texas I thought a review here would be appropriate.
The book is a collection of stories written by longtime Port Aransas guide and bait shop owner Barney Farley that were assembled and published posthumously. There is a lot of interesting and prophetic stuff in there about fishing on the Texas coast - he saw the heyday of it in the 1920s - 1950s and in the 1960s started writing short articles for the Corpus papers encouraging conservation long before it was fashionable. There are chapters on most every Texas gamefish and how to catch them; with tackle recommendations only your grandfather could appreciate!
The first few chapters are on Tarpon and a good bit about his experience fishing President Roosevelt.
That's Barney in the white shirt holding the tarpon up. There are parts of the story about the press lining the jetties and how he had to ask the President's security detail to back up so they could troll and catch tarpon. He describes coming down to the Lower Laguna at Brownsville with the President and buying shrimp from shrimp boats. He went into detail about how he had to tell President Roosevelt that neither his boat nor tackle were suitable for tarpon fishing when he was taken out to meet the President on his yacht. A yacht flanked by two destroyers.
Interestingly enough he took the President on a boat that was built in Port Aransas by his brother, Fred Farley, who designed and built boats to handle the chop yet handle good in Texas bays. Farley boats were built there for a number of years. This is a group of Farleys lined up for a day of fishing.
If you'll tolerate an aside - some of the later Farley boats were a little larger, up to 30' in length and featured automotive engines and two speed transmissions for trolling. Here is one outside the shop where they were built.
I thought that was interesting because when I was but a little Centerpole our family boat was a 28' Farley we kept at Port Mansfield. It was exactly like the one pictured above; straight inboard. Here's little Centerpole and Daddy Centerpole running the East cut -
and with a friend backed into the slip @ Mansfield (those slips were destroyed by Hurricane Alan in 1980).
Also, on BClark's reccomnedation I bit the bullet and bough Andy Mill's book. I wish I'd done that a lot sooner! If it were called the 'Encyclopedia of Tarpon' it still wouldn't describe the volume and level of detailed information contained. Thanks for the tip BKC.
