5/2/15 May Tarpon Fishing in Islamorada

Well the last couple days we’ve had some difficult tarpon fishing conditions.  We had a late cold front hit us and had pretty hard northwest winds followed by north this morning and now finally has swung around east again.  But very blustery for the most part.  This morning we got on the bait good first thing in the morning and were able to load up.  We had some good action early down by the bridges.  Quite a few cheap shots and 3 solid bites.  Unfortunately we had one fish  that just pulled off the hook, another that chaffed through the leader after 5 minutes, and the 3rd we got the leader on though he proceeded to run through the power line legs and cut us off.  All the best action was on the harder incoming tide as soon as it let up by 10:00 or so things slowed down.  We did come across a nice ball of bait and caught some more then fished near home to catch the falling tide.  Found some tarpon but they weren’t interested in feeding so we called it a day.  Anyways we got 1 on a technical release anyways.  Yesterday we patch fished in the morning and that was good for porgy and hogfish.  We tried tarpon later in the day and had one cheap shot by the bridges further south but unfortunately once the tide got rolling the weed got extremely thick and made it almost unfishable.  We tried dead baiting and caught a few sharks and a ‘mud marlin.’  Well tomorrow I have the day off so hopefully things will have a chance to rebound, the wind has swung back out of the east and hopefully it will stay there!  0 for 0 and 1 for 3.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk