Got out with Dan, Julie, and Sophie today down from Wisconsin. They hadn’t been to the Keys before and had the opportunity to come. We had planned on a full day excursion but we had some nasty weather about. Prefrontal with some rain and lightning. But it cleared up enough to make it out in the morning. I caught bait early my first early morning mullet run this year. We tried for tarpon to start and found quite a few locally. We hooked a big one after 20 minutes or so. She screamed off 150 yards of line and we gave chase. Julie hooked it but she had a bit of a leg injury so was tough for her to maneuver around in the chair so we passed it off to Dan. After the long run and a couple jumps she just dug in and we chased her around for over an hour. We finally got her to subdue and got some good boat side pictures. Nice 100 lb fish! After that we set back up, the tide had changed and the fish seemed to have kind of dispersed at that point. We did hook a cuda that we fought for a minute before cutting us off. We moved out to another area and saw a few more tarpon. But no more bites out of them though we did catch some big jack crevelle, and Sophie got an atlantic sharpnose shark. She really wanted to catch a shark so mission accomplished! We ran into the marina to use the bathroom and headed back out for some light tackle fishing after that. Plenty of action on the patch reefs before the weather chased us back in as another frontal line approached. But we got most of our day in at least. Looks like it’ll be cooling down into the 50s the next three nights, so that will likely make the big tarpon fishing a little slow for the week. Hopefully by next week they will start chewing again. We got lucky yesterday and it was flat calm so things really had a chance to warm up fast. I didn’t tarpon fish yesterday but I heard there were a few caught, but glad we gave it a go today. 1 for 1
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
