Got out with Paul and Peter over from Sweden. They really wanted to fish for tarpon. I told them the bite wasn’t red hot but we may get a shot or two if we were lucky, and they were game. Conditions weren’t great we had a ripping 20-25mph southeast wind again. Nothing seems to have been real happy since that started the day before. Bait was difficult we had leftovers luckily and managed to catch a half dozen fresh ones. We fished where we had been finding tarpon the last several times. Not much out there though we saw a handful in the first stop, but no bites not even a shark bite. We moved around a bit to where I had caught one a few days before, and again had a few fish around the boat I think that I could see on my sonar, but no action with tarpon. We did catch a nice blacktip shark. Water was super muddy with the southeast wind so the fish weren’t showing on top at all really. We stopped and did catch a nice snook on a spot real quick before checking some other channels. The other channel again I think there may have been a couple fish around, but no action but we did get a big sting ray. After that we headed back to try locally around town. I stopped and caught a few more mullet on the way home so we had some fresh bait again. We hit a local channel and found a ton of tarpon rolling around. As far as I could see up and down the channel, must’ve been hundreds of fish in there. Unfortunately though I had the feeling we were just seeing too many on the surface, doing the high roll, tail slapping thing they often do when they aren’t happy. They really weren’t we made a couple moves and fished very hard, but didn’t get a bite out of them, though we literally had them rolling between our baits and 10 feet from the boat at times. Can be frustrating when that happens! We did catch a jack crevelle and then called it a day. Oh well that is fishing and especially tarpon fishing in February, if the conditions aren’t favorable sometimes they just aren’t going to respond. Anyways looks like the winds are suppose to swing more easterly/northeasterly after tomorrow and then may be under 10 mph for the weekend which would be very nice. Hopefully things will improve a little bit. I’ll be sticking to simple fishing tomorrow I think, may give the tarpon at try for a little while, and then off for the next day or two. 0 for 0
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
