Got out for an afternoon half day with Sarah and Michael today. Normally I don’t like doing afternoon halves, but with business being off still with the hurricane I didn’t want to turn it down. The reason I normally dont do afternoon trips is the afternoon is often the toughest time of day to fish (you know the old saying about the early bird gets the worm right). It’s often tougher to get bait, the sun is the hottest/brightest so fish can be lethargic or leary as they can see/sense more, and other boats may have been to many of the spots you want to go to already who left in the morning. I just like giving my customers the best shot at catching fish, though we can still often get it done as we did today. We were able to find a good school of pilchards and loaded the live well with them. We fished around some of the islands in the bay as it was a bit rough out on the patch reefs out front. The first stop didn’t yield a whole bunch, the other day we found some nice mangroves there and a few redfish. We moved a bit and got a few keeper snappers there including one nice size 15 incher. After that it slowed down and we tried another island. Here we picked a few more keeper snappers. It was tough to get them to eat the pilchards, just lots of small snappers. We started mixing up our bait with shrimp and had to pick through a few little snappers but got a few more keepers. We made one more move and then got our limit finally. It took some work but we had plenty for dinner. We caught a few jack crevelles too. I made one more move and we had a few more snappers to throw back, saw a few baby tarpon rolling here and I was hoping maybe we’d get one but no luck. We headed back in and had a nice ride home, and Sarah and Michael both had a great time. I’ll have the next couple days off but am open to fish on the 26th of December if anyone wants to go! After that I’m pretty busy until Jan 4th or so I think. But I have plenty of mullet and some pilchards in my bait pen, so all prepped to go if anyone wants to give it a shot the day after christmas let me know! Hope everyone had a great holiday, merry christmas!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
