Figured I would announce the unofficial end of my ‘tarpon season.’ Tarpon of course can be caught all year long here in Islamorada, Florida. However November through January is the least likely time due to the colder water temperatures and lack of numbers of fish. Basically I don’t book tarpon trips in advance during this time but I am fishing for plenty of other things such as snook, redfish, drum, mackerel, cobia, porgies, hogfish, snapper, grouper, sharks, and more! Now as I said it is still possible to catch them, and if we get a string of 85 degree days and the water temperatures get in the high 70s, some of the local resident tarpon can get happy and you can have shots at catching them. However with the likelihood of cold fronts and inconsistency of the fishing, I really only target tarpon when the opportunities seem to present themselves, or I hear through my network of fishing buddies that they’ve seen or caught them. So I won’t be doing a lot of fishing for tarpon or updating the site much for the next few months. You can keep up with my other fishing by reading my other fishing report blog, fishingislamorada.com. I don’t update it as often as this, but I try to a couple times a month. Of course I am still available for charter for plenty of other things, fall and winter is a fabulous time to fish here and we have lots of other great fishing going on aside from tarpon. Drop me a line if your interested, and of course contact me if your looking to book a tarpon trip in 2015. We usually start fishing for them again in February, though the best time is April thru August.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
10/27/14 East Cape Sable Tarpon Fishing in October
Had a full day tarpon trip today. My angler really wanted to catch one even though he knew it wasn’t ‘season’. I told him there is always a shot at catching one here in islamorada as long as the weather is warm. We had recently had a cold front that dipped the temperatures in the backcountry. We saw a lot of bait around though not much activity from tarpon, usually with the ‘fall mullet run’ that was happening you often see tarpon busting them frequently. We fished in the morning around flamingo, saw a couple busting fish, but only had shark bites. I went out towards cape sable, we did not see much life in the canal. At the middle cape end there was plenty of bait, but no tarpon activity. I fished there for a bit without much of anything. So we ran down the beach and saw the big balls of black mullet pouring out with the tide. We did finally see some tarpon busting them, set up but only more shark bites. Finally the last spot we fished we had more sharks, and finally the last bait in the box we put out and hooked a big 120 lb tarpon. After a good fight we got the technical leader release before he popped off. As long as it stays fairly warm there should be some tarpon back there, but this is the last little window that you can expect to find them.
10/22/14 Great Cape Sable October Tarpon Fishing
Snuck out today we’ve had nasty weather the last couple days and looks to be here through Friday. Yesterday we got chased home from the rain we caught a few sharks and a cobia, did not see any tarpon. But today was much better. We had bait leftover from yesterday. We started the morning with some snook and snapper action. About 11:00 we made our way out towards east cape sable. We set up and tarpon began rolling everywhere and saw several free jumpers. Pretty soon we were getting bit up! We caught 5 out of 12 bites all in about 2 hours, pretty amazing fishing that is about as good as it gets. Most fish were in the 20-40 lb range but we did land one that was about 60. We headed home after that and only got rained on for about 20 minutes, well worth the price of admission for a day like this! The rest of October looks to be good fishing the rainy overcast weather definitely doesn’t hurt that.
