Got out with Rick and Greg today for what was to be a full day trip. The weather had other ideas though it looked pretty nasty with some incoming rain before a minor cold front that was hitting us. But it looked fishable at least for a while. We blasted out and it wasn’t too bad until we hit the line of weather. We battoned down and had to run through about 4 miles of torrential downpour, but once we got through to the other side it was kinda nice. We caught a ton of redfish for about an hour. It started to drizzle lightly after that and the tide quit. We looked for some tarpon and found quite a few. But they weren’t interested in our offerings, though we caught several blacktip sharks including a couple size large ones! After that we could see some tarpon free jumping and kept moving out towards them, it looked like it would be good fishing. But the rain intensified and we decided to run back towards home. Caught our limit of snappers on the way in and then called it a day. Made the best of it and beats sitting in a hotel room for sure. It’ll be cooling down more tonight and north wind and chilly tomorrow, probably good for snook/reds in the everglades. But then getting nice and calm friday through the weekend… could mean big things! Sounds like the tarpon bite around town is better then in the backcountry right now. Though sometimes it’s hard to sit around town all day, so unless people really really want a tarpon you have a lot more options running into the backcountry, which is what most of my clients have preferred as of late. As we get closer to March though, I think it’ll turn on back there for them.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
