4/29/14 Tarpon Fishing Long Key and Islamorada

Well I had my anglers yesterday for a morning and evening 4 hour trip. We ran down to long key to fish the incoming tide in the morning.  Not nearly as many fish as there had been down there but we had some action.  2 for sure solid bites and possibly another one and a few ‘cheap shots’.  Unfortunately we jumped the one fish off straight away I don’t think we got the hook set good in him.  The other one was a very large fish and I had taken my leader size down a bit to try to encourage a bite, but unfortunately it freyed through right away.  We did catch a couple of very large jacks though.  The evening trip we had more of the same bad luck.  We fished near home in some of the channels.  We had a pack of fish up within 30 minutes, taking multiple cheap shots at the baits and 2 solid bites again.  Just not able to get a good hookset one fish jumped straight at us which was tough to hook anyways, the other got the bait off somehow.  I gave it some more time we had a few more cheap shots after some time and eventually moved on.  We did catch a monster barracuda, and a couple sharks.  We moved back in the bay and tried a spot, after a bit of time we had double header tarpon eat both baits.  I thought for sure this was our time… and again both fish were gone as fast as they showed up!  Just not our day!  We tried drifting mullets the last of the tide further back in the channels, but only saw a few fish roll in the distance and did not have a sniff.  It’s a tough couple of days for me we’ve definitely had shots at fish just have not been able to seal the deal.  Wednesday I have these anglers for a full day, we are going in the backcountry and going to try the tarpon back there.   Hopefully the bad mojo is done with, I haven’t been in a slump in a while and I don’t like it!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk