Got out with Keith and Rich today for a full day. We caught some bait early on, some nice ‘beach bait’ small and medium size pilchards and had some shrimp we bought as well. The bait is started to show up in several areas for the fall which is nice to see. We hit the backcountry and found plenty of baby tarpon early on. They jumped off the hook on us though, Keith had a couple bites out of them but they didn’t want to stay on. We next moved to another canal where we got into a good mess of snook. We had double headers several times in a row and probably landed a dozen or so then things shut off. We saw a lot of tarpon rolling nearby so we messed around with them after that. Rich hooked up and landed a nice 30 lb tarpon! We also got into some more snook after this. It wasn’t as red hot of a bite, but we were getting one every 5 minutes or so and Keith got a couple nice good size slot redfish too! After that things slowed down and we met up with the other boat in our party. We tried a few different things, including drifting for trout in the bay and chumming for mackerel on the edge of the gulf, neither of which we had much luck with. Haven’t been out much since the storm so we wanted to try a few different things. After that we decided to hit a few channels for some mangrove snapper, even that was a little tough but we did find one good spot and caught 4 nice keepers before calling it a day. All in all it was a great day and we really made our day in the first couple hours of the morning, but we’ll take it! I’m fishing the next several days so hopefully the bite stays on, I’ll try to post another report after I get done with all that. But if you want to get out fishing October is a great time and we are starting to get the cooler northeasterly winds which usually can light the fishing up!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
