5/7/15 May Florida Keys Tarpon Report

Well the slow spell has continued we fished this morning and things hadn’t gotten any easier.  Bait was tough in the early morning we saw a handful of baits but weren’t able to get lined up on them right.  Luckily I was able to by some mullets and I had some dead ones from the other day plus a few crabs.  We caught the last trickle of falling tide and then had a fairly quick turnaround.  Plenty of fish again though they weren’t very happy we did not get much interest at all this morning aside from a few cudas and a shark.  Tried crabs and mullet and even a few different tricks but tarpon just wouldn’t respond.  Saw one fish caught and that was about it.  We had started out in the bay where there had been good numbers of fish and there were, then around the bridges we saw some fish laying underneath, finally we moved out on the ocean side to some fly fishing areas.  Saw probably 60 or so fish in the last 45 minutes training across the shallow areas.  But no interest for us unfortunately.  Last night was very similar we did not see as many fish as we did during the morning.  The water did warm up last night back up close to 80 degrees so I thought that would of helped.  We did find some fish eventually and had a couple fish up that boiled and flashed on our baits but wouldn’t eat.  That was about it and again we saw one boat catch a couple fish, though we saw another 50 boats throughout the night and that was the only action we saw.  Even making a drift with our crabs between 7 and 7:45 which is normally the ‘golden hour’ there wasn’t a boat to be seen hooked up to a fish.  Anyways things can’t get much tougher I’m sure they’ll have to start feeding again at some point.  I’ll likely be trying the backcountry the next few days as I have some 3/4 day trips and with as nice as the weather is some fish have likely moved in back there, plus the bycatch of sharks gives you more action!  0 for 0 and 0 for 0

Capt. Rick Stanczyk