Got out at the end of last month with my regular customer Rob Thomas and his buddies Rick and Carl. Some bait has been around which is good news and I went and found it there again today (July 5) because I’m fishing tomorrow. But last week we fished on the 28th and focused on tarpon in the backcountry. Started out around Flamingo and got a nice fish in the first stop, about a 60 lber for Carl. Saw a handful in the area too but after we caught the one it was more or less over with seemingly. After that we ran out west and fished around the mainland beaches. Didn’t visually see a whole lot but I ran to a general area I like to fish in the mid summer and sure enough we started marking a few fish on the sonar. We set up soon after and sure enough we caught another one pretty quickly, about a 30 lber smaller fish. Had several fish coming by us for about 20 minutes or so though we didn’t get another tarpon bite sitting there. After that we moved around and could still see a handful of fish rolling here and there. We moved a couple times and jumped one more fish. Other than that it was not too bad with the sharks. Sometimes the sharks can eat you alive but really we only hooked one about every 10-15 minutes. After that we looked in one more area we didn’t have a whole lot of time but didn’t see much for tarpon but did catch a little bit of bait. So all in all not bad it was good to see a decent body of fish and we had a handful of bites. July should yield some decent fishing as mentioned there has been some bait around. I’ll be taking a few trips short notice and Capt. Trentin and Capt. Brandon have some dates open too. Capt. Brandon has been on the tarpon pretty good locally if you are interested in doing a half day. Capt. Trentin is also still offering evening trips and the bait is close by locally so if you want to do that, the 4-8 PM window is often productive and I can about guarantee you’ll have it mostly to yourself which is always nice too.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
