Capt. Rick Stanczyk's Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

April has been decent overall this year for tarpon.  Honeslty not quite as good as last year though not bad.  We’ve just had to work at it a lot of days and some days that leads to banner fishing and some days just a few fish.  But that’s fishing!  We’ve still been having some late cold fronts (though at least not major tempearture drops – just northerly winds) and very windy days, which can make fishing a little more tricky.  I’m hoping May/June is going to be on fire for us but we will see what happens!

Here is a great video of Glen catching his first tarpon he fished with me for 2 days.  We caught several each day though on the first day he wasn’t able to get a ‘face grab’ but on day 2 the first fish of the day cooperated for that!

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

Well tarpon fishing is really starting to heat up.  We’ve had quite a few late cold fronts throughout March and every time things have started to get right, it seems to get shut down again.  And unfortunately I must say we have another cold front coming this weekend dropping back into the low 60s so it might slow things down yet again.  But this may bode well for anglers coming later in May/June, as many of the fish haven’t been ‘picked on’ yet so the latter part of the season hopefully will be strong.  The other day fishing was phenomenal we had a banner day releasing 13 tarpon at the bridges.  Today the bite wasn’t quite as hot but we still released 5.  That’s technical releases too as many of the fish you aren’t really able to get rolled over easily for pictures plus there are lots of sharks around trying to eat them so we try to preserve the tarpons life.  Here is a crazy clip of a shark trying to eat our tarpon the other day that we broke off and managed to chase the shark away from the tarpon.

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

Well tarpon season seems to be in full swing now getting into mid March.  Late cold fronts in February and even one a couple weeks ago in early March had held off the big droves of tarpon from showing up.  This isn’t always a bad thing though especially for our prime months of April, May, and June.  Sometimes if the fishing gets red hot in February/March it seems like the May/June timeframe sometimes gets tougher.  So hopefully this bodes well for the later ‘prime season’ months.  This past weekend we had a few flat calm days and I figured the tarpon would show up hot & heavy and they did.  I didn’t fish the last couple days but heard good reports.  We got out today and it was very good we went 4 for 4 on tarpon and only spent a couple hours doing it as my guys didn’t want to pull on big critters all day, so we spent the last half of the day catching a good number of snook.  But now we’ll pretty much be in full on tarpon mode the next several months.

I’m pretty much booked up for all of April but I haven’t started booking many May dates yet, only for regulars and customers who are looking to mount a trophy tarpon catch.  If you are in the latter category drop me a line and we can get you in on prime May tarpon dates.  Otherwise I’ll be opening up my May days to new customers at the end of this month.  Otherwise I have Capt. Brandon Storin running my old boat and he’s been doing very well with the tarpon too and he’s taking all the advanced bookings he can get.

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