Well April has almost come & gone! I’ve been fishing a bit more however it’s been primarily tarpon fishing at the bridges most every day. That’s all I’m going to be doing from here on out for the most part in April, May, and some in June. March may be a little bit of early season tarpon in the backcountry. But fishing has been fair for the bridge tarpon we’ve had a handful of really good days and a lot of days of having to work hard for a handful of bites. I did do a couple different things this week that I’ll share. A couple days ago I had my very good client and friend Bill out. We caught 4 tarpon on Monday and he takes good care of me so I gave him the option of running deep into the Gulf to check out some permit fishing. He was happy to do it. We ran a long way to a wreck and found quite a few good schools of spawning permit. Sight fishing them is very cool you see groups of 50-100 fish and they like to float on the surface sometimes even sticking their heads out of the water. Pitch a crab into them and WHAM! We hooked half a dozen or so in the morning but many of them got eaten by sharks and a few we broke off. We did manage to get one to the boat though so Bill was stoked about that and he had an excellent time just seeing something special like that and being able to hook up to those fish is fun in itself even if you don’t land them. Yesterday I had my dad out for our weekly fishing trip and we checked out some big snook spots in the backcountry which we haven’t really done much of this month. Not a whole lot to write home about but we did manage one good size fish around 16 lbs or so and we did find a load of nice tripletail and got two in the 18-20 inch range which were fun to catch.
My other crew of captains has been very busy too but coming up in May they have some availability. Capt. Stephen who is running my boat has been having a good time with clients. He’s available on Fridays and Saturdays, and will be taking night trips in May on occasion too for tarpon. Capt. Trentin on the skiff is available for morning or afternoon half days or full day trips and he’s been doing really well too with local tarpon, snook, and has become very good at catching big mangrove snappers. Capt. Brandon is mostly booked for the month of May but he’s been killing it out there too.
Give me a shout to get out on the water!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
