3/8/17 March Fishing in Islamorada

Well I’ve still been pretty busy the last week though I’m taking this next week off expecting the birth of my first child!  We’re due today but got a feeling it may be a little big longer.  Fishing had been decent the last week though the last 3 days on the water I had (Saturday – Monday) were incredibly rough.  Over the weekend we got hit by a minor front, not much of a temperature swing, but it blew 30+ mph for 2 days.  Almost unfishable…  But we made it out and did some snapper fishing around the islands.  The weekend fishing was very good, both days we got our share of ‘jumbo’ snappers in the 18-20 inch range, I think a half dozen on Saturday, and 3 on Sunday, plus plenty of 12 inchers to limit out.  On Sunday we also caught a juvenile tarpon which was awesome!  Monday wasn’t quite as good, we were able to get our limit of snapper at least, but it was a struggle to get some barely over 10 inch legal ones.  Though we did catch a couple big sheepshead too, and had plenty of shots at juvenile tarpon but they showed us no love.  I noticed the water temperatures had dropped considerably with the wind and were in the high 60s, so I’m sure that definitely messed the bigger tarpon and sharks up for a few days.  At least the few guys I talked to that tried that stuff, didn’t have much success.  Before the bad weather, I had a great 3 days fishing with John and Jan Shulze.  We had one flat calm day where we caught plenty of mackerel, then looked for tripletail without much success (didn’t see a single one!), but we did come across a school of free jumping tarpon.  We spent the rest of the day after them, and landed two fish of about 80 lbs, one for each of them!  Plus plenty of sharks including a hammerhead.  Day 2 the winds started to kick up out of the north, but we made it into the bay and caught plenty of trout – it was almost every cast for about 2 hours!  Then we made our way into the everglades creeks and had a slow pick of fish, but some quality, including a nice redfish, a handful of snook (we lost a big one too!), and Jan jumped a nice 30 lb tarpon on light tackle.  The last day was the first snapper day that I mentioned.  So they got to see a little bit of everything fishing with me for three days.  Before that I had a couple of double half day trips and we caught a ton of mackerel on all those trips.  Anyways looking forward to having the week off and adding a new fisherman (or woman) to the family!  I’ll be back when I start fishing again.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk