In the winter, those same flats are often exposed to high winds that make them tougher to fish, unless, by chance timing, the tide and the wind cancel each other out. With good winter conditions, you might find cobia on area flats looking for warmth and food. In bad conditions, flats anglers can fish nearby channels, or tuck into the lee of nearby mangrove islands to look for snapper and snook. In the spring and fall, the Tower Flats get a lot of boat- and jet-ski traffic which puts fish down.

Key West is still a scenic town, not that far from Cuba.

Putting seasonal strategies aside, sometimes when you’re in Key West and you just want to fish for a couple hours, the harbor is the convenient place to go for short trips. On such a day in the fall, Thompson and I chummed with live pilchards on the outgoing tide at a spot right beside Key West, near Fleming Key Cut. That cut leads directly to Garrison Bight Marina and also to City Marina, the most popular put-in for anglers towing boats. Both are less than a mile away from where we fished. We had cast-netted the pilchards minutes before along the nearby Mud Keys, where Thompson, and many other anglers this season, say that they have never seen so much bait.

We freelined the eye-hooked pilchards behind the boat and found young and hungry tarpon on a mud line by the cut. We suspected that the tarpon were preying on bait hanging on the edge of the mud line, like sailfish at the edge of a color change offshore and redfish along the cloudy water on a flat. We let the fish run with the bait a second or so before hooking them, or at least trying to hook them. We jumped three and landed two tarpon of about 15 pounds in an hour. Thompson likes 10-pound test, a Bimini twist to an Albright-knotted 30-pound fluorocarbon leader and a 1/0 or 2/0 circle hook. He says that the circle hooks minimize abrasion to the leader when you’re fighting tarpon on light tackle since they hook so often in the corner of the mouth.

The key to catching tarpon in the harbor, Thompson believes, is to get baits down to them. Especially as the tide moves faster, tarpon will be at the far end, deep, so you can either use more splitshot and bump it along to them on the bottom, or as Thompson prefers, freeline to them in the current and monitor the slack to ensure a hookup. Live baiting with a closed bail will only cause the bait to rise out of the feeding zone.

“I’m convinced tarpon fishing is a game of numbers,” Thompson says. “If they’re there, one of them is going to take a whack at a well-presented bait, and the more of them around, the better your chances.”

Massive amounts of water pour through the harbor from the Gulf on its north side, and the harbor is open at both ends, which ensures that constant water movement cleanses and revitalizes the harbor with new bait and fresh activity on a tidal timetable.

“From the mouth of the harbor to Fleming Key at its back,” Thompson points out, “there’s an hour and a half to two hours difference in the tide change. That gives you a heck of a window to pick and choose your spots depending on your preference for tidal movement.

“Every once in a while in the summer,” Thompson adds, “even blue water from the Gulf Stream fills the harbor and then you can see every rock on the bottom 30 feet down. It’s a beautiful sight.”