The news that North Carolina has a predictably good summer tarpon fishery in Pamlico Sound is interesting enough to many Mid-Atlantic marine anglers. The possibility that silver kings migrating to the area every summer may have a long-distance Cuba connection is even more fascinating.

That possibility is based on the return of a tag placed in a Pamlico Sound 70 pound tarpon on July 31, 1994. The fish was caught by Wayne Henry of Wilmington, while fishing with Ben Snead of New Bern, North Carolina during the second annual Oriental Rotary Tarpon Tournament. Snead tagged the fish, which was caught, killed, and sold to a Cuban fish market nearly two years later by Eduardo Perez Guerrero, a Cuban commercial fishermen.

Guerrero found the tag as he cleaned the tarpon, then sent the tag to the National Marine Fisheries Service Cooperative Tagging Center in Miami. Guerrero caught the fish using a handline while fishing from an inner-tube float, at night, along the bayfront of Havana Harbor — nearly 1,000 miles south of where the tarpon had been tagged almost two years earlier in North Carolina.