Got out with Scott and his family today for a full day trip. Tarpon was on the agenda and I told them there had been some around and actually the last trip they bit fairly well for us. However today we had a wind direction change… due south and backed up southwest in the backcountry areas. Not my favorite wind, it just blows on shore and creates big swells, and muddies up a lot of the areas I like to fish. But at least the water was nice and warm! We made a run into the backcountry as I had bait leftover from the other day. Did not see a ton of tarpon though a handful were about. I was hoping to see a pile of them, but just wasn’t to be. Anyhow, we set up and gave it a shot. After 30 minutes or so, we finally did get a bite out of a fish. A nice 80 lber went airborne, but unfortunately he threw the hook immediately. Nothing went wrong just a bad bite. After that things seemed to go real quiet we didn’t see much at all. Anyways we decided to look for some other things as the redfish and snook fishing has been decent back there. We stopped in another spot for tarpon for a quick minute, but no luck with that. We did good on redfish though later, and a handful of snook and some nice sea trout. Fished a few other areas and found reds in a couple other spots. Did see a tarpon or two in a creek that we tried for, no bites out of them but did hook a couple big sharks. And that was about it for our day. Tomorrow looks like a complete 180 with the wind, going hard northeast, but then things calm down some Wednesday and get real nice Thursday though Sunday. I’ll bet the tarpon do some big things in that period! 0 for 1
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
