Well another flat calm gorgeous day in Islamorada and I wasn’t booked, but couldn’t pass up the great opportunity to fish today! Just ripe conditions with the cold water and stillness that would create a warming trend, where the fish will often really go crazy as things get nice everywhere. I took my dad and our friend Capt. Dave Peck. Good fishing was the case and the water looked gorgeous most everywhere we fished, and we caught in probably 7 or 8 different spots… wonderful to see! We started off at cape sable fishing and got their early to beat the crowds. We got into a good mix of snook, redfish, and black drum. A few nice size florida keys snook and redfish. Then mostly medium sized guys would bite in little flurries. Eventually we hooked a nice snook and a big black drum – double header! Landed both fish which really made our trip right their. The big islamorada black drums a.k.a ‘big nasty’ are one of my winter time favorites. There are only a few spots we catch them regularly and only when conditions are right (usually cold). Though many boats know these areas so you have to beat ’em there. After that things slowed down we caught a few more redfish as the tide died. We moved over and tried another area with the trolling motor and caught another nice red, then I got a good size snook, and Dave got a december islamorada black drum. After that we slid into a creek and caught a nice red and missed another bite fishing the mouth. We went further in where I hadn’t really done much in recent memory but figured it was a good day to give it a look. We found one area where we caught several more redfish and a couple black drum which was cool! Got way up shallow inside there further then I had been, but couldn’t proceed further so we had to turn around. We then fished some shoreline areas and got on another great redfish bite! I think we landed close to a dozen and a few black drum here, with some double headers and even one triple header… really good fishing! Looked like several other boats were catching down the shore too, really good conditions for that being so calm with the clean water and high tide. We then hit the gulf to look for triple tails on the way home but only saw 1 which was funny as I’d been seeing quite a few the last couple days. We hit a few old school spots on the way home to check for more reds or snook, and low and behold a couple spots were holding even more redfish! Think we got 6 in one spot and 3 in another. Really great to see that in areas that had been fairly dry the last couple years. All in all a banner day I really lost count of the redfish but probably close to 30 of them alone, and maybe a dozen black drums and a dozen snook. Doesn’t get any better then that! I’m not booked at all until next Saturday so if you want to go fishing this week it should be fairly good. The cold weather will be going away so this epic bite may slow down somewhat, but as long as the winds dont crank a funky direction it should stay fairly good. That looks to be the forecast and midweek anyways maybe Wednesday looks like another calm one. Give me a shout let’s go fishing!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
