Well I’ve been out there after the snook lately and the last month or so the bite has been pretty good! The calm summer weather leads to consistent conditions and summer is traditionally a great time for snook. Many of the larger fish start roaming the shorelines outside, and more of the numbers of smaller/medium fish can be found fishing structure. There are enough numbers so far that we haven’t really needed to have pilchards or other live bait, shrimp have done the trick and pinfish for your shots at bigger ones. The mosquitos and horseflies have been bad on occasion and honestly they are bad one day, and tolerable the next – but I always advise to wear long pants/shirts to protect yourself as much as you can from the bugs. I had my dad and one of our marina managers Robyn out today, and we were rewarded catching 5 bigger snook fishing the deeper areas offshore. A couple of them were true giant snook (for here) in the 38 inch range! We didn’t mess much with the numbers of smaller fish as we got chased out pretty quickly by the bugs. These larger fish though you don’t always get numbers of them, but if you don’t mind putting the time in for a bite or two it could easily be your personal best snook and that’s always a good day just to get one fish like that in my book!
Hopefully tarpon fishing will get a little more consistent come July time right now there are some fish in the backcountry but it’s definitely taking a lot of patience and weeding through many sharks for a bite or two… so I haven’t really been pushing it unless it’s what somebody is dead set on doing. But again often July gets a little more consistent with the summer time resident tarpon in the backcountry.
Give me a shout if you want to get down and go fishing this summer!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
