2/26/15 February Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Just got back in town after a week long vacation out west in the snow.  The end of January and February has not been ideal for tarpon fishing – we had a lot of late cold weather.  This included a couple of the coldest days we’ve had in years while I was out of town.  It got down into the 40s a couple nights.  So I have not been tarpon fishing much though the gulf, backcountry, and patch reefs have been good fishing for the most part to give us more of our traditional ‘winter time’ action.  The last few days while I was away we did have a few slick calm gorgeous days with some great fishing, I heard reports of all kinds of things including tarpon on the fly.  Today however the wind blew hard out of the southwest with weak tides, though the water temperatures at least are in the mid to high 70s.  Anyways we found a good school of mullet mudding and were able to catch them.  We ran into the backcountry and did not find any tarpon though did catch a few sharks, as well as had some action on the light rods.  We finished up the day locally around Islamorada and caught a nice ‘mud marlin’ and saw a tarpon rolling around in a channel.  Did not get him to bite though, but in another spot in the last 15 minutes we finally hooked a nice 90 lb tarpon we landed.  All in all not a bad day considering the poor conditions.  Looks like the wind is swinging back into the northeastern quadrant as another mild front hits us, but temperatures shouldn’t drop too much so hopefully the tarpon will continue making their way here!  1 for 1

Capt. Rick Stanczyk