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
