Got out today with Cary and Colin. The winds were cranking hard east at 25 mph, blustery! We caught some mullet in the morning and then headed to the tarpon grounds. Fishing wasn’t easy there we had a weak incoming tide straight into the wind. Found a few tarpon in a couple spots, the first stop they didn’t bite but the second stop Colin hooked and landed a nice 80 lb fish! We also got a small shark and a big bluefish. Mission accomplished! We tried a couple spots nearby for some snook, but the water was too low to get to two of them even though it was high tide. We are just on a low water tide cycle right now I suppose. But we did find a spot that we were able to get to and had a couple big snook grab our pinfish we put out. Unfortunately we weren’t able to land either one, the first got into some tree structure and broke us off. The second just went through the leader… must’ve swallowed the hook. Anyways at least we had a couple bites and they were both exciting! After that we had to take our time getting into the gulf for the mackerels with the swells. But we made it out there to the mackerel grounds. We chummed and didn’t have much action aside from catfish for the first 30 or 40 minutes. But I saw a few mackerel darting around so we tried switching up our tactics and got them to bite a little bit. By the end they were biting OK and I think we landed 16 mackerels or so… not a bad way to end the day at all! We headed on home after that. Not a bad day all things considered. Back at it tomorrow.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
