Just wrapped up another 3 days of fishing here in islamorada for tarpon in June. We had a good week again, little breeze on Monday and Tuesday which made it comfortable at least, and Wednesday was fairly calm. Monday and Tuesday we stuck to the bridges as we’ve been doing the last couple of months. Still a decent number of fish around but you are having to put a little work in, and not always productive all through the day. The early mornings have been most consistently productive… both days we were able to get several bites in the first hour and land a handful of fish. Though after that initial rally once the sun is up it took some grinding. Monday we were able to get a few more bites after the initial early rally, and then at the end of the day once the tide started falling and water dirtied up we had more bites and caught a couple more tarpon. Very similar fishing on Tuesday though after that early morning rally, it was several hours without much of anything aside from a few nurse sharks, mutton snappers, and cudas. Then same thing the last hour and a half when the tide fell we had 4 more good bites and landed a couple more tarpon. I would say we had 8 tarpon bites Monday and 7 on Tuesday so that is still decent fishing. Wednesday we decided to mix it up and fished the bridges early which were good to us – we were able to get two nice tarpon up to the hand in the first hour and get some nice pictures. After that we ran into the backcountry as I heard some reports there was some tarpon showing up back there. This typically happens sometime in the summer as many of the large migrating fish move north. Some years it’s later in the summer but they were there really good now so that is great to see. We ended up catching 9 more tarpon for a total of 11 on the day, including 4 ‘double header’ hookups. It was just as good as fishing gets for tarpon. Now I can’t say what will happen next week but it was very good to see those numbers of fish, and typically now the fishing pressure is much less through the summer. So I think it’s going to be good for us later in june and july… just getting bait sometimes can become the tricky thing. But we still have a decent little school of bait we’ve been able to work to get us through and that should get better once we get more into summer and the mullet show up in the backcountry more. Back at it next week!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
