Although saltwater fly fishing has become popular relatively recently on the Texas flats, the Texas coast has a rich angling history. In the early 1900s, the region was already established as a world-class fishing ground. Noted anglers from all over the country who over the years came to fish for tarpon at Port Aransas, stayed at the Tarpon Inn, a re-sort hotel that is still open today. In 1906, guests staying at the Tarpon Inn could fish from skiffs tied together and towed out to the jetties by sailboat, for $3.50 a day. That year's Tarpon Inn proprietor, J. E. Cotter, reported that visiting anglers caught 1,537 tarpon during the April-to- November fishing season.

Over the years the great Texas tarpon fishery has attracted world- class anglers to Port Aransas, including Charles Frederick Holder, founder in 1898 of the Tuna Club of Avalon, Santa Catalina Island, California; Richard Sutton, author of The Silver Kings of Aransas Pass; and fabled angler and author S. Kip Farrington, Jr. Of the many notable angling events that have taken place in Texas, none is more celebrated than Franklin Delano Roosevelt's visit to the waters around Port Aransas in 1937 to sample the tarpon fishing. The president, looking like any summer tourist in floppy hat and long-sleeved shirt, fished with local guides and fought and landed tarpon on two trips to the nearby jetties.

The great migrations of tarpon that thrived in Texas waters began to decline in the mid-1960s. Although no scientific investigation has been conducted into the cause of this decline, a number of factors have been suggested, including the damming of rivers, which has led to restricted freshwater inflows to marine estuaries; the increased inshore boating activity; pollution by runoff of agricultural pesticides; netting and dynamiting of tarpon schools in the rivers of Mexico; and shifts in baitfish migration patterns.

In recent years, tarpon have returned to Texas's nearshore waters in good numbers. Despite several hard freezes, which wreaked havoc on fish stocks in Texas's shallow estuaries, fishing for inshore species has shown remarkable gains in quantity and quality in recent seasons. A decade-long effort by anglers, marine conservation groups, and state fisheries officials to conserve the resource, remove commercial netting from bay waters, reduce size and bag limits, and supplement gamefish stocks through a soundly managed marine hatchery program are paying off. Dockside creel surveys and bag seine sampling by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials back up the fish stories being told by anglers from Sabine Pass