5/28/16 Islamorada Tarpon Fishing Report

Got out with Jim, Jay, and Ruth Anne today for some tarpon fishing for a 3/4 day.  They are also fishing with me tomorrow.  We ran out into the backcountry to avoid the holiday weekend crowds, but also since the fishing has been pretty good back there as of late.  I also didn’t have to bother catching bait as one of the other guides wasn’t fishing this weekend and gave me a cooler of leftover mullet which was plenty for today.  Things have finally started to stay semi-consistent, though I am a little leary to start thinking like that especially with this year I see how quickly it likes to change!  Anyways the winds laid down to almost nothing.  We fished some of the channels we did the last few days, a couple sharks to start us off and then Ruth Anne hooked a nice 90 lb tarpon we landed which put on quite a show when it was first hooked.  After that things settle down for a little while and the tide started to slow up.  I was threatening to leave spots and then all of a sudden Jay jumped a nice tarpon, and a few minutes after that ended up hooking one that he also landed of about 50 lbs.  Now it was really time to go as the tide was getting near slack.  We ran further out west where we had found fish the previous day though the tide was not quite getting going yet.  We had a few shark bites while the water was still, and once it started going Jim jumped a tarpon.  We didn’t see whole lot though with as calm as it was I would’ve expected to see quite a few more rolling etc…  That was the last of the tarpon bites unfortunately we fished for almost another hour with the tide rolling out pretty good, though we did catch a few more sharks and a small cobia anyways.  All in all no complaints after this year I’m very happy to catch at least one on any day!  Tomorrow we will do it again I’ll probably start off in the same general areas and maybe check out some new stuff later on as the fish may be moving around a little bit.  2 for 4

Capt. Rick Stanczyk