Got out yesterday with a couple good friends Bobby & Gina. Bobby I went to coral shores high school with down here and we’re still good friends. I caught some mullet locally early in the morning and we headed out. The time change it was still near day break which was nice. Was sort of pre-frontal condition we had a decent west wind, not blowing too hard but once we got offshore in the near gulf, you definitely get some larger swells there in the open water. Luckily my contender bay boat can handle it no problem, though I will say we didn’t see another boat out there all day! Tarpon were flopping around just about everywhere. We hooked one with the first bait out after about 15 minutes. Stud fish of 100 lbs or so, she screamed drag for a good 10 second freight train run before jumping! Could’ve nearly spooled us honestly! We fought her for a good 15 minutes and got her boat side though she popped off on the leader. It’s especially hard to leader big fish for a trophy shot picture when you are getting tossed around in big swells, and aside with the shark problem as bad as it is I honestly rather the fish break off with good energy left to be able to evade them. After that we started getting some shark bites so we jumped around. We ended up catching two more tarpon that we got leader releases on and quite a few more sharks including a couple large bulls. I was able to get a couple cool jumping videos you can check out down below. I have a couple days open near the end of the month and still a few days in April and May. Again I’m doing a season rate that’s slightly higher but I’m only fishing 3x a week, so I can often move your day around if the weather is bad or I think fishing is not gonna be worthwhile. And I also film a lot of the trip and can send you cool professionally edited clips such as this. Give me a shout and if I’m not available my other captains are doing a great job these days too and are available to be booked for any trip length or date as long as they’re open!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
