Capt. Rick Stanczyk's Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Thanks to all my anglers who enjoyed tarpon fishing with me this season!  I know I’ll be seeing many of you next year in 2015 again.  If your thinking of booking a tarpon trip in 2015 and haven’t done so, you should try to plan it soon!  At this point (Dec. 31, 2014) more than half of April and May is already booked – these are the best months of the year for big tarpon.  Summer time (June/July/August – click to see fishing reports from 2014 season, sorted by month) is still a great time to go as you can see from my blog this past year, and I still have plenty of availability.  So far this winter things have been very warm, which may lead to an early start of the 2015 tarpon migration.  Often as early as February things get rocking and rolling, and March was a big month for me last year with the tarpon too.  I’m sure overall it will be another action packed year catching tarpon in Islamorada!  Well I wanted to give a quick yearly summary for my readers.  I did a pretty good job tracking and catching all fish caught this season which is how I like to sell myself – with the results!  Now I did have the website crash at one point and I’m fairly certain I was able to recover all the data, but the numbers should be fairly close to accurate.  Anyways the numbers for 2014 are:

264 Tarpon Landed (Fish that we touched the leader, or got the leader to the rod tip)
out of 150 Tarpon Fishing Trips (This includes trips where we fished all day for tarpon, as well as trips where we may of only tried for an hour – I did have to guess a little bit as I did not log every trip where we may of only tried for a little bit, but I did add some extra trips to try and account for that).  Which overall is 1.76 tarpon Landed Per Trip on average.  Of course there were plenty of other fish we had chase baits and put on a show, grab baits and spit the hook, or just lost due to other circumstances.

I’d also like to add that these numbers all reflect day time fishing.  This can often require a bit more work to get the fish to cooperate, but I personally enjoy the day time fishing much more as you get to see the bite, the acrobatic action of the fish, etc…  I fish so many full days now and have enough business I don’t really like to do the middle of the night thing any longer.

Anyways I hope to have you out on the boat in the 2015 season!  Drop me a line if your interested in tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk

Well being December I have not been doing much tarpon fishing.  The snook, redfish, and black drum have been keeping me busy in the everglades.  And very good spanish mackerel and cobia fishing in the gulf, along with plenty of action on the patch reefs.  Though I did catch have a client catch a 50 lb tarpon last week on light tackle while we were pitching shrimp for snook in a canal.  Today we actually tried tarpon fishing as we’ve had a warm streak and water temperatures are in the mid 70s.  We happened into a big school of mullet and filled the cooler with one throw.  Set up off the mainland and within 5 minutes we had 2 tarpon in the air, though both spit the hooks.  Tough break as for the next hour we had plenty of action with sharks, but alas no more tarpon.  Just goes to show it is possible in the winter time when it is warm, just can’t count on it being productive all the time.  Anyways may try it again here before the end of the year as things look to be staying fairly warm.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk

Well we were after sharks today in the backcountry of Islamorada.  A gorgeous november day light winds and cool weather.  We caught some mullet on the way to the backcountry and set up in some channels.  We were able to bend the light rods while waiting, and stock up on a few more ladyfish.  We caught a nice black tip while sitting there, and then hooked a nice 50 lb tarpon.  Several jumps later and a few good runs, we landed the fish.  Later on we moved to a different area.  Tide still falling hard.  Some big muds kicked up and we had some more shark activity, this time big lemon shark and some other blacktips.  We saw a tarpon bust and moved over in that area, though did not get a bite out of them.  Last part of the day we tried another skinny channel and had a big blacktip at first, then right after hooked a smaller 20 lb fish.  We jumped him off near the boat though, and almost immediately after the other rod went off and a tarpon spit the bait right away.  We finished the day with some nice size trout.  Not bad as I said in my previous post, not doing tarpon fishing by default anymore, but when the conditions are right there are still shots at catching them.  That usually means calm, warm weather!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk