Well summer time is here and I’ve been starting to mix it up a little more with the backcountry fishing. We had kind of a tougher tarpon season overall and so the last few weeks I’ve been going in the backcountry and picking a few tarpon but we’ve had some decent snook fishing. Bait’s been fair with some spots holding some nice pilchards which are always a good addition to have to our usual shrimp we bring. The creeks and mangroves have held some good numbers of snook at times with a few small redfish and goliath groupers mixed in. I had some very good tarpon fishing in the deep backcountry in early May for a few weeks. That had since dried up but we did find another school of tarpon in some of the closer backcountry areas we had some luck with this past week. June should yield some good opportunities for both tarpon and snook and likely some redfish, tripletail, goliaths, and other things mixed in. We even had some large jumbo snook make an appearance a couple weeks ago. It was pretty interesting we were running back along the shore and saw a big bust which I thought was tarpon. We stopped to look around and marked some fish on the sidescan which I was sure were tarpon. Sure enough we put our big baits out and we caught a couple of 18-20 lb snook! I think there were some tarpon mixed in but I think a lot of those must’ve been snook because the next day we fished the same area and the same thing happened we caught 1 big snook! So pretty cool to stumble into that randomly. I hadn’t been finding a whole lot of big snook in any of my other usual haunts but hopefully they’ll show up in June or July that usually becomes something thats a possibility during the summer. Anyways we have availability in June and I’ll be booking myself personally in July a little more short notice because we have some tentative trips planned. But Capt. Steve and Capt. Trent will be available for sure. Shoot me a message if you want to ask any questions or get something booked!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
YouTube: Bud n’ Mary’s Marina
