Great day fun fishing with my dad, Rich, and Mike. Business has slowed down and all of a sudden I have about the next two weeks open. Fishing has been ridiculously good with stellar conditions, so I couldn’t help myself and figured we’d go have some fun! We got into the tarpon good early on and started the day jumping off a couple smaller fish, then Mike got a nice 60 lber and while fighting that, Rich got about a 20 lber for a double header! Unfortunately the big one didn’t stick around for a picture when we got him on the leader. Most of those tarpon were small, which we are legally allowed to lift up for pictures (very carefully and quickly of course). The big ones we don’t do that with we leave them in the water for a quick boatside picture. After that we caught one more and then hooked something that was fighting a little different. I said good chance it’s a big snook and sure enough it was, close to a 20 lber! Just spectacular love seeing those big fish like that we don’t catch them like that every day. After that we moved around a little and found some hard bottom structure that I like. There were more tarpon here and we soon caught another one! After that we hooked up a double header, a smaller tarpon and something that was fighting a little strange. I told the crew that a few days ago there were some porker redfish out there, and sure enough up came a big 25 lb redfish! That trick didn’t work the rest of the day though trying to call them out, but it was very cool to see those big redfish and snook. We caught a couple more tarpon there and a few sharks and then left those fish alone after that. We ran around the mainland areas just checking out a few spots and seeing what things looked like. We found a few small redfish and snook and a black drum in one area, so we caught 3 backcountry SLAMS which was awesome! After that we decided to head on back and caught some bait on the way home. But what a day landing 6 tarpon, and a good handful of snook and redfish including two porkers of each species! 6 for 8
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
