Well the sometimes you get the tarpon, sometimes the tarpon gets you. Today fishing was tough it was northwest breeze in the morning. Not ideal for the backcountry tarpon fishing. Anyways we got there early and caught some nice fresh bait first thing. Was slack tide when we got there but got rolling pretty quickly, incoming tide. The first channel we fished was dead nothing going on. We had caught 1 out of 2 there yesterday afternoon and a few sharks in the last hour, but today it seemed lifeless. So we moved channels and we had a shark and then jumped a tarpon soon after. Another 30 minutes and we jumped another tarpon, caught a big bull shark, and then the weed came. Horrendous mats of red mangy stuff that we get on and off this time of year. Though it was not there yesterday, but today it made it practically unfishable. The wind had laid out by then and the tarpon were rolling, we jumped 1 more fish that we had a bite out of really quick and that was about it. Frustrating when you know it would of been great fishing if you could keep the baits out there for more than a minute without having to reel them in to get weeds and gunk off. Oh well tomorrow we will likely fish around town if we tarpon fish. Today I really wanted to get away from the crowds as its a busy saturday and there were a couple tournaments going on. I heard the fishing around town was slow though so all in all getting 3 bites back there was probably still worth the ride back, but it’s nice when you can catch them!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
4/25/14 Backcountry Tarpon Fishing Report
We were not really focused on tarpon today. My anglers wanted fish for dinner. So we did that most of the day. But we did give tarpon a try for the last hour after I talked them into it! We fished some of the backcountry areas since we were back there anyways and I wanted to see if the fish were too. The recent late cold fronts had made the fishing back there inconsistent and tough, though the last couple days were flat calm and warmed right back up so I thought they may move in. I was right we only fished the last hour and right at the change of the tide but we caught 1 out of 2 tarpon and a couple sharks. Nice way to end our day. I’ll be doing a full day tarpon fishing tomorrow and likely heading back there to get away from the crowds in town here.
4/24/14 Tarpon Fishing in Islamorada in April
Had a full day and an evening trip tonight. Long day! We tarpon fished for all of it really. They day trip had lots of action. We only caught 1 fish but we had probably 10 solid bites and plenty of other bust the mullets and ‘cheap shot’ us. So it kept us entertained. Mostly all on live bait fishing channel 2 bridge. The evening trip was tough for me. We found some bait balls in between trips so I loaded up with fresh bait. We went back around channel 2 to start and had a few cheap shots fairly quick. I was ready for it to be a productive night and then that was just about all the tarpon action we had. We fished hard too. Saw a handful of fish caught but we just could not get lined up on them. Ran back up the road around 6:30 and tried some of the local channels. We saw plenty of fish rolling though could not get them to eat for nothing. We did catch a few sharks at least. Oh well you can’t catch them every time… though it’s been a while since I really have been on a ‘tarpon trip’ and not had a bite. Hopefully the last time for a while!
