Capt. Rick Stanczyk's Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Yesterday I got ‘no showed’ so I didn’t fish, stunk cause I had loaded up on bait early in the morning.  So today we put it to good use.  This week we have our british guests from the UK over and they book 5 guides for about 6 days.  Always a treat very nice guys and they know the routine and enjoy the different personalities and fishing styles.  We ran way back off cape sable where we had luck the last few days.  Fishing was pretty good we went 3 for 3 on tarpon, not red hot action with them but 3 bites in about 4 hours of fishing and got lucky and hooked/landed them all.  We also had good shark activity with blacktips and even a couple hammerheads.  I’ve got the same group through the end of the week so may do the same thing tomorrow.  A couple days ago i had the same guys as today, we fished the backcountry channels and not much for tarpon activity though we did land plenty of sharks and caught some nice trout and snappers.  3 for 3

Capt. Rick Stanczyk 

Well had the same customers again today we ran into the everglades where we found good tarpon yesterday.  However this morning things were not exactly the same.  First off bait was a little tougher we had to make a few throws and drive around a bit before we finally got one good shot on the mullet.  Though we got what we needed thankfully.  We ran out off the beaches and the tide was still trickling in.  We caught a few sharks and waited for the tide to turn.  Though we did not see any tarpon activity at all.  Fished for a while and a few more sharks.  Then we ran further along the mainland to another area.  There we spotted some activity, some tarpon free jumping and busting.  We set up and soon had some shark action.  Eventually we got our tarpon bite and we caught a nice 100 lb fish.  Soon after that we hooked another 130 lb fish that we fought for a while.  He ended up finishing our morning so Rupert landed 2 big tarpon over 100 lbs each, very nice.  2 for 2.

Had a 3/4 day trip today so we switched things up and went back in the everglades.  It’s been slick calm and the water warmed up nicely, though slick calm isn’t always the best for tarpon fishing.  The local fishery has been very tough the last week as I’m sure you can tell from my posts.  Anyways we gave the backcountry a try with the warm weather and calm it felt like summer time  so I tried some of our summer time areas.  We caught bait very well back there and tried some channels.  Saw a few tarpon roll but no bites though we did catch a big blacktip and lemon shark.  We ran out off the beaches later and caught the falling tide.  Saw quite a few tarpon out there.  We got there a little late though another boat there was having some action with them.  We caught quite a few sharks including many small blacktips, atlantic sharpnoses, a large nurse shark, and about a 250 lb tiger shark which was very cool.  Finally we were able to hook about a 100 lb tarpon that put up a very good fight to finish our day.  Tomorrow we are planning to leave early and run right to the same area so I think we will get in on the ‘hot bite’ hopefully!  1 for 1

Capt. Rick Stanczyk