October Fishing

10/23/2025 October Tarpon Fishing in the Florida Keys

We’re well into October and we’ve been having the fall bait run going on for the last few weeks here.  Tarpon fishing hasn’t been red hot as it sometimes can get in October when we get those conditions but it’s been fair I’ll say.  We had more numbers of tarpon around I feel in July and the later summer it’s been smaller groups though when you get in them you can still have decent fishing.  Right now if you get in the areas with fish you can get some good windows but it’s often short lived and when conditions go south fishing can deteriorate quickly.  But the last few trips I’ve had in the last couple of weeks we’ve had a tarpon bite or two about every day we’ve tried.  Last week I had a regular customer out Randy and his family and we had one day we caught 3 tarpon and had a few more bites.  Then the last three days I’ve fished we had action with baby tarpon in the creeks one day with several bites and landed one.  Yesterday we focused more on slightly larger tarpon and jumped one in the morning, and then caught one in the afternoon.  Today we were fishing for larger snook with my dad and ran into a good group of tarpon and ended up catching one on pinfish.  We did see some more tarpon activity further up the coast where the mullet run was going on but we didn’t end up messing with them there.  We have a good hard wind coming this weekend then next week it’s lightening up but will stay northerly but wont’ get real cold.  That should continue to push bait down and fire up some tarpon that are here.  This may continue right into early November obviously no guarantees but as long as water temps stay in the high 70s/80s tarpon are a possibility!

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

10/10/23 October Tarpon Update

Well I had a bit of a break here for the first week of October.  Took my dad fishing once and we caught a few nice snook.  But today I had Mr. Bill who manages the marina for our family and his son Wayne, along with my dad too.  We snook fished most of the day but brought the tarpon gear in case the opportunity presented it self.  Didn’t see any massive schools of tarpon throughout the day or much to really get excited about.  But there was plenty of bait around, and random crashes on them in lots of the usual fishing haunts.  My personal take is things are just kind of ‘spread out’ right now – there are tarpon around but really kind of spread thin all over.  We ended up just kind of looking around slowly with our sonar along some shoreline and eventually marked one.  Set up and within 5 minutes had a big shark on and a few minutes later hooked a nice 75 lb tarpon we caught.  Capt. Stephen had the boat yesterday and they hooked several small tarpon while snook fishing, and ended up catching a couple later in the day too.  So definitely not a bad time to try and catch tarpon right now and I think once we get a little more cool weather up north which we’re suppose to in a few days, it may push some larger schools of fish our way and we may have a few weeks of really good tarpon fishing.

Right now next week is really busy we have trips booked every day with two boats.  Though myself or Capt. Stephen can likely squeeze an extra trip in now since we have two contender bays available.  So if you want to get out after the silver king, give me a shout.  I’ll shoot ya straight with regards to what I think our chances our but overall it seems decently good now and bait is fairly easy which is one of the biggest factors.

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