2/10/19 + 2/11/19 February Islamorada Tarpon Fishing

2/10/19 – Well we gave it a shot for a short while both today and yesterday for some tarpon.  Didn’t really expect too much as the winds were cranking 20-25mph yesterday, and a good 20 mph today.  But the guys wanted to give it a shot.  Yesterday we tried some of the areas where we had caught a couple fish last week.  We only tried for about 45 minutes, I gave a good look around and we never for sure even saw a tarpon.  We did get a few sharks though.  But we caught plenty of other fish including a bunch of mangrove snapper for dinner, some spanish mackerel, and tons of redfish to finish up the day.  Nice thing right now there is so much other good fishing, you can usually have an easy out if the tarpon aren’t cooperating.  0 for 0

2/11/19 – Today my guys wanted to try and catch some snook as they hadn’t caught those before.  But they didn’t mind spending a little time for tarpon if possible.  I had not been way up the coast yet and wanted to see if anything was up there tarpon wise.  I also knew the redfish and snook fishing had reportedly been pretty good, so I felt OK taking the gamble to see and falling back on the other stuff.  We did find a decent school of tarpon early on, but smaller resident size fish in the 20 to 40 lb range… not the big herd of 80+ lb migratory fish I was expecting.  We set up and they kind of spread out and left as soon as we had baits out.  A few hung around, but we did not get a bite, and after 30 minutes or so we didn’t see many signs of them.  Anyways after that we left them alone and caught plenty of redfish, a good handful of snook, some small goliath groupers, some nice sea trout, and a few other odds and ends.  0 for 0

May try to give the tarpon a whirl tomorrow, but as of now it’s real hit or miss.  Should get better when the winds calm down and it warms up slightly more.  But if you really want one and are willing to invest the day to it, it’s definitely possible.

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