Capt. Rick Stanczyk's Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Another week of fishing here in the Florida Keys for tarpon in April and I’ve got another update!  So we’ve still been kind of waiting on a bigger push of fish here in the Islamorada area.  As mentioned we had a lot of early season arrivals in the backcountry as is normal however that started drying up a little bit a few weeks ago.  Though locally we’ve not seen big schools of fish around our bridges and channels yet.  There have been some decent groups of resident fish and we’ve still been catching some, but a lot of working different spots and hunting around… not just staying in one area all day where there are tons of fish to move around on.  So this week we had southerly pre-frontal conditions Tuesday and I had one of my best days in a while.  We landed three tarpon and hooked 4 or 5 more that we jumped off.  We kind of had bites throughout the day every little area we tried produced so one of those where we just kept getting lucky.  The following day we had hard north wind and a temperature drop.  It didn’t get freezing cold but water temps did get back down to the mid 70s and with how the fishing has been I feel like any detriment to the conditions isn’t going to help.  We fished hard all day and only had one bite we missed around mid day on the slack tide of all things.  But we did catch plenty of jacks and a few sharks.  I had the same anglers both days and they at least got to see the very good day before.  Thursday we didn’t tarpon fish but I had my dad looking for big snook in the backcountry.  We did mark a few tarpon back there but we didn’t really fish for them, though I doubt it would’ve been very good again with some good north wind and chillier weather.  Friday we did go down to some of the more southerly bridges and we did finally see a good load of fish.  That was nice to see and even had a big hammerhead come up as we hooked one.  We only fished a couple hours it wasn’t great we worked hard moving 4 or 5 times and we got zipped by a couple of tarpon… short bites we call them where they just picked it up and ran hard for a few seconds before dropping it.  We did catch quite a few big nurse sharks though.  But again it was northerly breeze and water was still 76 degrees.  So things are looking promising once we get some more stable weather and the cold fronts cease.  Again I’m feeling we will have stronger fishing in later May and June hopefully since it wasn’t an early season bonanza this year.  I’m looking forward to next week as it looks like better weather/no more cold fronts, and I will have an update Thursday afternoon before we go out of town hopefully.

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

Well we are officially into April which is generally considered the start of true ‘prime time’ tarpon fishing here in the Florida Keys.  This year however things are not quite rolling as much as we’d like to yet.  I fished locally this week as much of the early season backcountry tarpon fishing hasn’t really been quite worth the run and we’ve been finding some decent fishing closer to home.  So Monday we caught two tarpon and missed one more fishing the local channels nearby and getting an early start, getting one nice fish on a live mullet and another on dead.  That was in the first couple hours of the morning.  After that we didn’t have much other tarpon action but we caught some jacks and sharks.  Wednesday was similar fishing for us I had Kevin out and we did the same routine and again caught a nice fish on our live mullet first thing and jumped another one off.  We did have some bites later in the day as well jumping a fish at one of the bridges and then jumping a couple more fish in the last 30 minutes before it was time to come home.  But did get one up to the boat for pictures at least!  Today the wind really picked up and it was blowing a good 20-25 mph.  We didn’t get a whole lot of love early on, had one bite we missed near daybreak but not sure if it was a tarpon or not.  Then an hour or so later had a similar bite in another spot just zipped drag for about a couple seconds and stopped.  We didn’t mark quite as many as tarpon as the couple days before but we were marking a handful so that kept our heads in the game.  We ran down and tried the bridges it was pretty gnarly with the wind and waves but we did get a tarpon to eat a live bait though he sucked him right off the hook unfortunately.  We did catch several big jacks and a nurse shark again.  Not much for tarpon at the bridges yet unfortunately but hopefully that will change soon.  We did luck out though and on the way home we stopped where we had jumped a couple fish in the afternoon the day before and they were in there again.  We caught one pretty quickly and then jumped another one and with about 20 minutes left we caught another 40-50 lb fish, so two on the board in the last hour which was a great way to end a little bit of a frustrating day with missed bites otherwise.

So all in all not a bad week we caught tarpon every trip so can’t complain about that too much but again it’s not quite what we like to see in April.  Having to still really work for a handful of bites and no big piles of fish anywhere where you can just stay in one area all day long.  But again I’m hopeful that will mean our later season fishing may be a little better we’ll just have to wait and see.  If you want to get out give me a shout I can let you know what’s going on… Capt. Steve and Capt. Trent have some availability especially on more short notice night trips which can be a great time to target the silver king!

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