1/26/17 January Backcountry Fishing Islamorada Florida

Got out with Joe and his dad today and we went and hit the gulf early.  It was a little breezy out of the south on the ride out, but about 2 miles from the spot the wind suddenly laid off to nothing making for a nice morning!  We had good mackerel action right off the bat and we caught plenty of them for the next couple hours.  We also got a few blue runners, ladyfish, and other various things.  We had a live blue runner out there for a little bit on wire line, and something crashed him hard but unfortunately cut us off way above the swivel.  Later on we tried another wreck further out but the water was much muddier out there.  Even though it was flat calm and should’ve been nice water, it was still very stirred up from the tremendous wind we had a few days ago.  We caught a few more mackerels and jacks there, but no cobias or anything like that.  We ran to the cape to try some areas for snook and redfish.  The tide was coming in there and carrying the muddy water with it… we tried 4 spots and only had a couple bites in one, but unfortunately we pulled a couple snook off and that was it.  I saw a few guys I know and they said the fishing was a little better early on first thing in the morning, but had shut off for them at that point too.  We saw plenty of small tarpon crashing finger mullets, and tried to mess with them but no luck.  We decided to put the big rods out off the beach and caught several lemon sharks up to 120 lbs.  We also landed a nice tripletail of 5 lbs or so, kept him for dinner!  Lastly we had something but pull us around for about 10 minutes but then swam into some rocks/structure which I had never seen before… but anyways I marked it so maybe I found myself a new hole!  All in all not too bad of a day, out again tomorrow it looks like it’ll still be nice.  Suppose to cool off this weekend, but now the wind forecast is much less, so maybe it’ll get cold and not blow crazy and the everglades fishing will turn back on!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk

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