Wow what a day fishing with our friends Ricky Walker and Paul Young visiting from the UK. Years ago they both did a show that aired all over the UK called Hooked on Fishing and had show several shows with my father Richard Stanczyk Sr. We’ve remained good friends through the years, and Ricky had visited this year in April with his son and we had a good day catching snook and tarpon. Paul got to tag along this time. We still had the cold water from the recent cold front, and light northeast winds, which I was hoping would be a good recipe for some great fishing. We hit it right and it was action packed all day long! All throughout the tide, everywhere we went there seemed to be fish! We started the day with a very healthy snook and then a smaller one. Then we got a few more black drums and snook. Another area was loaded with nice seatrout – all healthy looking specimens and definitely keeper size though we released them all. Later on we got into absolute pile of redfish as the tide started to fall. And nice size reds for us too, not many little guys as had been around often in the warmer temperatures. These were all slot size fish and some above. We even had a 30 something incher swim right under the bow we could see on the surface, it was amazing! Then we got into some tarpon action which was awesome. Our Mustad Fishing jigs with our PENN Fishing SpinFisher Vs did the trick and we landed all of our tarpon on the mustad 1/4 oz jigs! Paul had just been asking about whether or not tarpon would bite in this cold, I said not often but your best bet is with a nice big shrimp. As things started to warm slightly, they got a little active and my dad caught two and then Paul got himself one as well! While Paul caught his we doubled up on nice redfish too which made for a wild triple header! We decided to kind of wrap it up at that point and we checked a few things I had not fished in a while but did not have much luck there. But a good day to try as we had already had a killer day! Just what a magical day these two brought some good luck with them that is for sure. We will be getting some south/southeast wind tomorrow and a lot warmer for a few days, then another front mid week though I don’t think we’ll get a major temperature drop. Might mix up the fishing over the weekend with the south wind but when it calms down then goes north later this week, should be real good.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
