1/27/16 January Islamorada Fishing in the Florida Keys Report

Had a good day today it slicked off and was flat calm all day long!  At least the water is still cool so it didn’t feel too hot.  We pounded the spanish mackerel this morning, must’ve caught 30 or so in about 1.5 hours!  It was just about every cast…  After that we looked for tripletails for a little bit, but didn’t see any and decided to head inshore to fish for some bigger stuff.  We checked out a couple channels looking for possible tarpon as I had heard there were a few around the day before.  We didn’t see much but once I set up on the trolling motor to anchor us in place, we started marking a few on the bottom machine.  After about 30 minutes we saw one roll and that confirmed it – tarpon were here!  We caught two decent sized sawfish off the bottom, up to about 200 lbs each.  We caught several lemon sharks up to about 100 lbs, and a few smaller blacktip sharks.  After moving around and getting in front of some rolling tarpon, we got our tarpon bite and landed a nice 75 lb fish.  It was a great spring-like day for the end of january!  We tried an area for some trout afterwards, but all we found was catfish!  The water out on the edge of the gulf looked much better then the previous couple days after that hard 45 mph blow we had early in the week.  Back at it tomorrow.

Capt. Rick Stanczyk

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