Got out with Brian (Jimmy) and his buddy Bruce today. Slightly windier but not too bad overall the forecast is really not much wind for early March, which traditionally is one of our windiest months of the year! That’s nice because we had pretty snotty weather for February with cold fronts and rain through the winter. We had to catch a little bait to start I was running low so we searched in a few local honey holes. Found a few but they were playing hard to get so we ran further in the backcountry. Ran a different route than I normally go and we came across a few good looking muds with a few birds bombing. First stop was kinda hard to get lined up on the mullets but the next mud over we ended up doing pretty well and caught a couple dozen with 4 or 5 casts of the net. We then made our way to the backcountry and still got back there right around 8 AM. Totally different feel today there were hardly any boats out there which was a welcome surprise. I only saw maybe 4 or 5 all day back there, and the previous days its been a fleet of 25-30! We didn’t find the tarpon right off the bat, we scanned around and looked where we had been getting them but it was kind of a ghost town. We ran further up the beach and eventually saw one bust nearby us… stopped and put the trolling motor in and sure enough we started marking a good group of them. But similar to yesterday they weren’t really showing too much every 10-15 minutes you’d see one. Luckily I had the faith to keep looking around but that comes with experience. We set up and it was good fishing we ended up actually getting 5 bites on our live pinfish and only one on one of our mullets. Sure enough spend all that time and effort to get mullet and not end up needing it, but hey I’d rather have them just to be safe because thats our tried and true method! Anyways the pin bites were fun we ended up landing 4 fish and got hands on 3 of them. No shark activity today as far as big sharks went so that was very nice to see. We really ended up sticking in the same general area all day only moving maybe a couple hundred yards a few times. But much different than yesterday when we had to move 5 or 6 times just to get a bite to start. Oh well that’s why they call it fishing and it’s different every day all you can do is give it your best. The boys had a great time and I look forward to fishing with them again!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
