Great day with Brandon, Rob, and William! The boys wanted to do some tarpon fishing and I told them we’d still been catching a few. I hadn’t been in a few days and the last day I went we got chased back in from the rain and lightning. But I had a good report from yesterday so I was excited to get out there and check things out. We already had some bait stashed away that was in good shape so we just went with that and headed out early. The last couple days the winds been blowing but it’s swung around more northeast, as opposed to southeast, which is giving us a little blast of refreshing cooler air and also feels a bit like Fall which is great! This can often trigger the ‘fall bait run’ effect where we get a lot of baitfish and bigger predator fish moving back down the coast as it is cooling off further north and they are coming back down for the winter. Every year is different and I don’t think it’s really in full effect yet, but definitely had that feeling. Anyways we found a decent group of tarpon that were flopping around, cart wheeling, doing the usual tarpon thing when that is going on. Not a whole ton of fish, but a good enough group that we were able to get in on them. We caught it right at the tide change but still managed to hook three tarpon and landed them all! A couple smaller guys in the 20-30 lb range, and one decent one that was about 60 lbs. After that a good storm blew in and it started to pour for about 30 minutes. We fished through it and actually landed our last tarpon in the midst of it. We caught a few more sharks and then the weather had passed. The tarpon seemed to have thinned out after that. We ran and tried another area closer to home and first bait out we got a big monster snook close to 20 lbs! What a catch and awesome to see. We got some pictures and released her very healthy, snook is something I don’t like to kill on my boat especially with all the ones dying further north of us right now. She was over the slot limit anyways. After that we hooked a big something not sure what but it cut us off. Then we saw a good size tarpon roll behind the boat and within a few minutes, we hooked a nice 85 lber that gave us a great fight! After that things slowed down we fished there a bit more but didn’t do much. We tried one more area on the way home and did see one tarpon we tried to get set up near but no luck. Anyways a great day for the boys there is definitely still good fishing to be had here in Islamorada, FL. September and October can still be very good and you get the place to yourself. Off for a few days if anyone wants to go later this week I’m not booked until Thursday, looks like we’ll have a similar condition so it could be good! 4 for 4
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
