Florida Keys Reef Fishing

1-17-13 Islamorada Reef Fishing

Today was kind of a weird day with weather while fishing in Islamorada. It was a pre-frontal day, with the morning starting out with a south-east wind and then no wind with quite a bit of rain, and then a north-west wind. We started out the day by catching live ballyhoo and cigar minnows for bait. The Bn’M was now ready for some Islamorada Fishing! We headed out another mile and fishing just outside the reef. We tried for a sailfish for an hour, but we never had a sailfish bite. We did catch a nice blackfin tuna though while trying. The next couple hours brought rain on and off, and we kept the baits out but didn’t have any action. Once the rain let up we decided to anchor down and do some bottom fishing. We caught plenty of nice yellowtail snapper for dinner. We also caught a nice gag grouper, which would have been a keeper, but since the season is closed he went back in the ocean. We picked off a couple cero mackerel and then made another move. About 1:30 p.m. we found a sailfish swimming over the sand bottom. I thought this might be our shot, we made a couple good casts, but the fish had no interest at all and kept on his way. We then decided to go for some more action and caught a handful of big barracudas up to 15 lbs. With the clock winding down we only had a little while left on our Islamorada offshore fishing trip. A couple boats to the south of me found a big school of cobia so we raced down there just in time for some action. Our first bite was a nice 25 lb cobia and was the fish of the day! We also caught a smaller one before wrapping up our deep sea fishing charter in the Florida Keys.

Capt. Nick Stanczyk

bnmcharters@gmail.com