Rick Stanczyk

Well got out for a couple days here before labor day weekend.  Still a good amount of tarpon in the backcountry but not quite as many as we saw last week.  More concentrated and not visually seeing them jump all around like they sometimes do.  But we found a decent body of them in one of the areas we often see them the last two days.  Yesterday we looked around a good bit before just kinda putting them out.  We ended up seeing one jump and hooked up pretty quickly and caught it.  After that the weather got bad there was a good squall line moving down the edge of the everglades that chased us out of there.  We ended up fishing some of the channels of flamingo and found a few more tarpon and managed a couple other bites but they didn’t stay hooked up for us.  But at least we got one.  Today we had similar weather pattern but we had a good calm window for the first couple of hours.  I ran right to where we caught our first fish yesterday and had to look around but we did mark some fish on the sonar.  Pretty much every time we marked one we set up and put our baits out and after 5-10 minutes we’d hook up.  We ended up catching 4 and jumped off one more so really good fishing overall.  Did see one big pack of fish that we drifted a bait into and hooked up which was really cool.  After that again the weather started getting nasty and blowing 20 mph and rain, so we ran back towards flamingo but got chased out of there too and ended up calling it a day early.  But anyways still good opportunities for tarpon this late summer.  I’ll be back to fishing next week have a few days coming up but if you want to get out after them in the next couple of months give me a shout.  Capt. Stephen will be back early September too and we’ll be working together to keep grinding on these tarpon.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina

I hadn’t been fishing much lately so that’s why I haven’t posted much.  But I had gotten out some the last week a couple times so wanted to share an update.  The last week or so there seems to have been a lot of tarpon that have moved into the backcountry.  We hadn’t really had a strong consistent push of fish yet this summer but it looks like we may be getting it now and hopefully they’ll stick around for September and October.  I had my dad out the other day and we weren’t tarpon fishing we were looking for big snook, but we did happen to hook a couple tarpon while fishing for those.  We also saw quite a few jumping around and doing there thing so I figured it would probably be pretty good.  We were able to whack the mullet too and I will say at least for now the bait is plentiful back there so mullet seem easy to come by which is often the hard part about tarpon fishing in the off season.  Today we had a tarpon trip and we went back there with our bait.  Loads of tarpon just about as far as you could see!  We ended up hooking 7 I think and landed 4, and also caught a couple big sharks and a nice tripletail.  We even spent the last hour trying for a big snook so we likely could’ve had a few more tarpon bites had we stuck with that but my anglers each caught a couple and were good with that.  Anyways as mentioned it looks like we may have a really good September.  That was a good month for me last year and its nice being off season you really get it to yourself back there.  I don’t have much on the books but I’ll be taking some booking in September and Capt. Stephen will be available as well.  We’ll of course be sharing fishing info and bait so you’ll be in good hands regardless of which one of us takes you out.  But a 3/4 day will often do it and we like to hit it early departing at 6AM.  If you want to give it shot give me a shout and we’ll make it happen.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina