Another week of fishing here in the Florida Keys for tarpon in April and I’ve got another update! So we’ve still been kind of waiting on a bigger push of fish here in the Islamorada area. As mentioned we had a lot of early season arrivals in the backcountry as is normal however that started drying up a little bit a few weeks ago. Though locally we’ve not seen big schools of fish around our bridges and channels yet. There have been some decent groups of resident fish and we’ve still been catching some, but a lot of working different spots and hunting around… not just staying in one area all day where there are tons of fish to move around on. So this week we had southerly pre-frontal conditions Tuesday and I had one of my best days in a while. We landed three tarpon and hooked 4 or 5 more that we jumped off. We kind of had bites throughout the day every little area we tried produced so one of those where we just kept getting lucky. The following day we had hard north wind and a temperature drop. It didn’t get freezing cold but water temps did get back down to the mid 70s and with how the fishing has been I feel like any detriment to the conditions isn’t going to help. We fished hard all day and only had one bite we missed around mid day on the slack tide of all things. But we did catch plenty of jacks and a few sharks. I had the same anglers both days and they at least got to see the very good day before. Thursday we didn’t tarpon fish but I had my dad looking for big snook in the backcountry. We did mark a few tarpon back there but we didn’t really fish for them, though I doubt it would’ve been very good again with some good north wind and chillier weather. Friday we did go down to some of the more southerly bridges and we did finally see a good load of fish. That was nice to see and even had a big hammerhead come up as we hooked one. We only fished a couple hours it wasn’t great we worked hard moving 4 or 5 times and we got zipped by a couple of tarpon… short bites we call them where they just picked it up and ran hard for a few seconds before dropping it. We did catch quite a few big nurse sharks though. But again it was northerly breeze and water was still 76 degrees. So things are looking promising once we get some more stable weather and the cold fronts cease. Again I’m feeling we will have stronger fishing in later May and June hopefully since it wasn’t an early season bonanza this year. I’m looking forward to next week as it looks like better weather/no more cold fronts, and I will have an update Thursday afternoon before we go out of town hopefully.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
