4/26/14 Everglades Tarpon Fishing in April

Well the sometimes you get the tarpon, sometimes the tarpon gets you.  Today fishing was tough it was northwest breeze in the morning.  Not ideal for the backcountry tarpon fishing.  Anyways we got there early and caught some nice fresh bait first thing.  Was slack tide when we got there but got rolling pretty quickly, incoming tide.  The first channel we fished was dead nothing going on.  We had caught 1 out of 2 there yesterday afternoon and a few sharks in the last hour, but today it seemed lifeless.  So we moved channels and we had a shark and then jumped a tarpon soon after.  Another 30 minutes and we jumped another tarpon, caught a big bull shark, and then the weed came.  Horrendous mats of red mangy stuff that we get on and off this time of year.  Though it was not there yesterday, but today it made it practically unfishable.  The wind had laid out by then and the tarpon were rolling, we jumped 1 more fish that we had a bite out of really quick and that was about it.  Frustrating when you know it would of been great fishing if you could keep the baits out there for more than a minute without having to reel them in to get weeds and gunk off.  Oh well tomorrow we will likely fish around town if we tarpon fish.  Today I really wanted to get away from the crowds as its a busy saturday and there were a couple tournaments going on.  I heard the fishing around town was slow though so all in all getting 3 bites back there was probably still worth the ride back, but it’s nice when you can catch them!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk