reat day fun fishing with my dad Richard Stanczyk Sr. and wife Elizabeth Baxter! We hit the ‘glades early as we had a cold front the last couple of days chill things down again. This often gives us some great opportunity at quality size fish in the backcountry! We had falling tide all day long and were loaded up with shrimp. We fished sevearl areas hard early on, nothing was red hot we had to put our time in, but all of them seemed to hold a handful of fish. We started the day off with a nice big black drum of 20 to 25 lbs! These ‘big nasty’ creatures seem to bite best on some of our coldest days of the year and when the biggest ones come out to play. You can see the mustad fishing chartreuse darter jig in his mouth, these wide gap hooks are perfect when you may have a shot at a larger size fish. After some more hard work, my dad got a couple of real nice size snook on our SpinFisher Vs! We caguht a good handful of nice size trout as well, and then a few smaller snook and drum. We moved around and found a few more drum and snook in a couple different areas. Nothing red hot though again seemed each spot held a handful. We moved to another area and set up and then we got on a decent bite of snook and redfish. We gave it a bit there and then worked our way towards home. We decided to stop and fish an area I hadn’t fished in a long time as we had a negative tide situation. The cold fronts often help push the water out of the bay, and at low tide the flats get exposed really trapping fish in some of the runoffs where it is slightly deeper. We got into the area and then just started bailing redfish! It was awesome to see, nothing huge but just about every cast. We didn’t stay long as I was just testing to see if fish were there, and they were very nice to see. We headed on home after that. Things started to warm back up and the wind was more easterly. Looks like it’ll swing more southeast tomorrow and likely continue to warm up… Then another weaker front on Saturday and chilly for a few nights. It’s definitely winter time here in the Florida Keys, but the fishing is hot!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
