Backcountry Fishing Reports

Got out for an afternoon half day with Sarah and Michael today.  Normally I don’t like doing afternoon halves, but with business being off still with the hurricane I didn’t want to turn it down.  The reason I normally dont do afternoon trips is the afternoon is often the toughest time of day to fish (you know the old saying about the early bird gets the worm right).  It’s often tougher to get bait, the sun is the hottest/brightest so fish can be lethargic or leary as they can see/sense more, and other boats may have been to many of the spots you want to go to already who left in the morning.  I just like giving my customers the best shot at catching fish, though we can still often get it done as we did today.  We were able to find a good school of pilchards and loaded the live well with them.  We fished around some of the islands in the bay as it was a bit rough out on the patch reefs out front.  The first stop didn’t yield a whole bunch, the other day we found some nice mangroves there and a few redfish.  We moved a bit and got a few keeper snappers there including one nice size 15 incher.  After that it slowed down and we tried another island.  Here we picked a few more keeper snappers.  It was tough to get them to eat the pilchards, just lots of small snappers.  We started mixing up our bait with shrimp and had to pick through a few little snappers but got a few more keepers.  We made one more move and then got our limit finally.  It took some work but we had plenty for dinner.  We caught a few jack crevelles too.  I made one more move and we had a few more snappers to throw back, saw a few baby tarpon rolling here and I was hoping maybe we’d get one but no luck.  We headed back in and had a nice ride home, and Sarah and Michael both had a great time.  I’ll have the next couple days off but am open to fish on the 26th of December if anyone wants to go!  After that I’m pretty busy until Jan 4th or so I think.  But I have plenty of mullet and some pilchards in my bait pen, so all prepped to go if anyone wants to give it a shot the day after christmas let me know!  Hope everyone had a great holiday, merry christmas!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Got out with Eric and his twin sons, Evan and Ethan, today for a full day islamorada backcountry fishing charter.  They kind of left it up to me as far as what to fish for.  I told them we had tarpon action the day before, and the right conditions for it even though this isn’t really ‘tarpon season’ in december.  But it was still warm with fairly calm winds, and the water temperatures are in the right zone plus we found a bunch of fish the day before.  They were down to try so we decided to catch some fresh mullet to start the day.  We found some nice muds with fairly easy mullet in them, I think we got 3 dozen or so.  We hit the channels first thing as opposed to later in the afternoon like yesterday.  Boy there were some tarpon there today!  I think hundreds of fish!  They were free jumping, rolling, busting bait, and doing all the things tarpon like to do.  Definitely a dream scenario!  We didn’t have a red hot bite but we managed to fool a couple and Eric landed a nice big 150+ lb fish, and a 80 lb fish!  Great fights and jumps out of them both we got some good pictures.  We also got another sawfish and a blacktip shark.  It was great to see especially in the middle of winter.  But when it’s 80 degrees out something like this can happen any time of year here in the Florida Keys.  After that the tide slowed down and the fish seemed to lay down and settle a bit, so I figured it’d be a good time to try something else.  We hit the gulf for spanish mackerel which I knew would be good action for the boys.  They did great and we fished for an hour and probably caught close to 20 mackerels!  Plenty of blue runners too for rod bending to keep the kids busy.  After that the boys wanted to try and catch a snook and I said I might know a spot.  I had some leftover pilchards from yesterday which I never ended up using and wanted to, as I made a big mess trying to catch them and didn’t want that to be for nothing!  They went to good use and we caught a couple redfish, some nice size mangrove snappers, and one snook.  I think we had a couple other snook bites too but we missed them.  All in all just a banner day with a backcountry SLAM for the boat.  Eric had even brought some bananas on board with him but even they couldn’t bring us bad luck!  I have an afternoon half day tomorrow, but am available in the morning if anybody wants to do a half day trip.  I have bait and know where some tarpon are, doesn’t get any better then that lol!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Well today the weather absolutely slicked out flat calm and things really warmed up.  Water temperatures in the bay got into the mid 70s, possibly higher in some areas.  Usually the perfect condition for some winter time tarpon action.  They can really show up from nowhere with a few days like this to let things warm back up.  75 degrees usually is the magic number for water temperatures usually.  Anyways I had Duane, Diana, and their grandson Gilly out for the day.  We started out catching some pilchards which we ended up not using much of, but caught a ton of glass minnows in my net too!  This made a huge mess and wasn’t how I wanted to start the day, but we shook it off and went about our day.  We hit the spanish mackerel grounds first out in the gulf.  It looked good with nice water color and good falling tide as soon as we got there.  We put the chum bag in and geared up with jigheads with heavy mono leader tipped with shrimp.  We caught a mackerel first cast and I knew it was going to be good.  Just about how you want the bite we probably caught 2 dozen or so and a variety of snappers too.  Sometimes the mackerel fishing is ‘too good’ and then you end up getting cut off a lot as fish follow each other and sometimes bite at the knots in the line where your leader is tied!  After we had enough of that we ran some lines looking for triple tail on the crab pot buoys.  We didn’t see any on the way up towards the mainland.  We stopped there to look for tarpon but didn’t see any signs of them in the first area we looked.  We headed back along a different buoy line and found a few triple tails and caught two.  Nothing big but fun to catch anyhow.  We checked another channel for tarpon and this time hit the jackpot!  As soon as I slowed down I saw tarpon on my sonar.  After 10 minutes or so we saw a few start to roll.  I knew we’d have a decent shot at getting one.  We caught a few big blacktip sharks, and then we got a tarpon bite!  A nice 100 lber he was a big fish.  Unfortunately we didn’t get any good boatside pictures but my friends nearby snapped a nice pictures of us fighting him and the fish jumping.  We got the fish on the leader but the hook popped out before we could get the pictures.  After that we caught 3 sawfish which was really cool!  I was hoping a few cobia may pop up on the sawfish but we didn’t see any.  We headed home after that, what a great day!  Out again for a full day tomorrow may give it a shot for the tarpon again.  Saturday morning I have a half day available if anyone wants to go fishing!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Got out with Lee and his wife today for a quick little half day islamorada fishing charter.  We hit the patch reefs since the winds were light and there has been pretty good action out there as of late.  They also wanted eating fish and that is usually a good bet for that this time of year too.  We got into some big bar jacks and cero mackerel in the first stop.  The cero mackerel is the best eating of all the mackerels and we usually find them on the ocean side patch reefs.  Though not as consistently as the spanish mackerels in the gulf.  But they were fun and great action!  The next few stops were mostly snappers… mangroves, yellowtail, lanes, and muttons.  Nothing huge but some decent mangroves for dinner at least.  We also got one nice hogfish but it was his lucky day, they are out of season now until May so we really can’t keep them any longer as our fishing season for them is in the winter and spring.  The last stop also had some small juvenile groupers which were something different to pull on.  All in all just a gorgeous day here winter time in islamorada florida.  Got the next few days booked and xmas week is looking pretty busy.  I have a few openings right after xmas the 26th and 27th, if anyone wants to go let me know!  Also can go the morning of the 23rd, saturday morning.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

Well another flat calm gorgeous day in Islamorada and I wasn’t booked, but couldn’t pass up the great opportunity to fish today!  Just ripe conditions with the cold water and stillness that would create a warming trend, where the fish will often really go crazy as things get nice everywhere.  I took my dad and our friend Capt. Dave Peck.  Good fishing was the case and the water looked gorgeous most everywhere we fished, and we caught in probably 7 or 8 different spots… wonderful to see!  We started off at cape sable fishing and got their early to beat the crowds.  We got into a good mix of snook, redfish, and black drum.  A few nice size florida keys snook and redfish.  Then mostly medium sized guys would bite in little flurries.  Eventually we hooked a nice snook and a big black drum – double header!  Landed both fish which really made our trip right their.  The big islamorada black drums a.k.a ‘big nasty’ are one of my winter time favorites.  There are only a few spots we catch them regularly and only when conditions are right (usually cold).  Though many boats know these areas so you have to beat ’em there.  After that things slowed down we caught a few more redfish as the tide died.  We moved over and tried another area with the trolling motor and caught another nice red, then I got a good size snook, and Dave got a december islamorada black drum.  After that we slid into a creek and caught a nice red and missed another bite fishing the mouth.  We went further in where I hadn’t really done much in recent memory but figured it was a good day to give it a look.  We found one area where we caught several more redfish and a couple black drum which was cool!  Got way up shallow inside there further then I had been, but couldn’t proceed further so we had to turn around.  We then fished some shoreline areas and got on another great redfish bite!  I think we landed close to a dozen and a few black drum here, with some double headers and even one triple header… really good fishing!  Looked like several other boats were catching down the shore too, really good conditions for that being so calm with the clean water and high tide.  We then hit the gulf to look for triple tails on the way home but only saw 1 which was funny as I’d been seeing quite a few the last couple days.  We hit a few old school spots on the way home to check for more reds or snook, and low and behold a couple spots were holding even more redfish!  Think we got 6 in one spot and 3 in another.  Really great to see that in areas that had been fairly dry the last couple years.  All in all a banner day I really lost count of the redfish but probably close to 30 of them alone, and maybe a dozen black drums and a dozen snook.  Doesn’t get any better then that!  I’m not booked at all until next Saturday so if you want to go fishing this week it should be fairly good.  The cold weather will be going away so this epic bite may slow down somewhat, but as long as the winds dont crank a funky direction it should stay fairly good.  That looks to be the forecast and midweek anyways maybe Wednesday looks like another calm one.  Give me a shout let’s go fishing!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing