Just wrapped up my three days of fishing for this week. On Monday 5/20/25 I had Ray down with his buddy Scott. We nearly got weathered out… massive thunderstorms starting blowing up around 5 AM and even knocked power out in Islamorada for a couple of hours. We had a little window to get out around 8 AM after waiting and watching until 6 AM. We decided to go for it and made the best of it. We had to hide under the bridges for a little bit to avoid some showers but after that we were able to get good fishing in. We ended up getting one tarpon for Ray and then losing another one that wrapped us up in some structure under the bridge. After that things died down as the tide quit. We found a few fish in some other areas and cudas ate us up. Finally the rain opened up a little and we were able to fish another bridge and found some more fish in the last hour and got one more tarpon. None cooperative for pics but glad to have gotten a couple on a tough condition day.
Yesterday the weather was much nicer but maybe a little too nice! It got slick calm and we saw tons of tarpon around the big bridge. I wasn’t able to get there the day before due to weather so i was hoping the fish would be nice and happy since they had the previous day off! Tarpon were rolling everywhere but they weren’t responding super great. We were able to catch one after a few moves early on for Brian that we got good pictures of. Then we went several hours without another bite! Looked good and we were in fish the whole time but again they were being finicky. Finally we got one more before the tide quit thankfully. After that we ran back up near Islamorada and fished one of the other bridges. We grinded and fished a couple more hours, and were able to catch one more tarpon and jumped off another. So all in all not a bad day by any means to get 3 tarpon but we did have to work hard for our 4 bites.
Today I had Jack and Brandon and I was readying myself for it to be a grind again. Though we had a tiny bit of east breeze and that might’ve made all the difference! Today the tarpon pulled us out of the boat I think we had over 10 bites and ‘landed’ 6 or so. We got one nice one up for pictures of Jack. Brandon had several nearly rolled over but they kept popping off when we tried to really get them submitted. We even had one fish drag us up near conch key into a small canal that luckily he turned and swam out of because we couldn’t of chased him up in there! Anyways good to have a big number day again after a few slower days.
Tarpon fishing is still in full swing here in May. Decent numbers of fish around and I think we’ll have good fishing into June. I don’t have much left for ‘season’ but summer time is still a great time to fish in July so give me a shout if you want to get out then. Of course Capt. Stephen and Capt. Trent have availability in June as well still especially if you want to do an evening tarpon trip or something like that.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
