Today I had Charlie out for a full day of fishing. Tarpon was on his bucket list as was a larger size snook. I told him tarpon fishing had been really good and we’d try for snook as well. He also was hoping for some dinner fish and there had been some triple tails back there too. We went after bait first, it wasn’t easy we didn’t get many where I’d been getting them the last couple days. So we gave it 30 minutes there then ran to another spot. Didn’t see much but eventually we found a good school in a channel. Got two good throws and caught a couple dozen, enough for what we needed. We tried an area for tarpon and where there may be large snook too, jumped off 1 tarpon then hooked some big sharks that cut us off. I could see some tarpon off in the distance which looked like bigger ones so we moved out there. Soon after we hooked a big 90 lb tarpon! Charlie fought her well and we got some nice jump shots and boatside pictures. After the 30 minute battle they seemed to be gone though. We ran out where some smaller tarpon had been, didn’t see a whole lot but a handful. Nothing in the first stop but the second stop we hooked a couple tarpon, jumped one off right away and another Charlie had on for a few minutes before he threw the hook. We tried a few areas for snook after that with some pinfish we had without much luck. Kind of muddy water in most those areas though it didn’t look great. So we tried one last spot again where a big snook may of been. Tide was starting in and after 20 minutes or so, Charlies rod took off! He got a nice big 18 lb snook, a true trophy size one for Islamorada! After that we looked for triple tails, we had seen some swimming around while tarpon fishing earlier but only got a couple shots on some which didn’t bite. We didn’t see any now at this point where I had saw them yesterday, so we ran to check one more area. No triple tails there, but a load of tarpon! We had about 15 minutes left and I told Charlie we probably had a good shot at getting a tarpon, so we opted to try that and sure enough within about 5 minutes Charlie caught another 30 lb tarpon to finish the day. Fun day and nice to cross a couple fish off his bucket list, and quality fish at that! 2 for 5
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
