snowy grouper

1-22-13 Islamorada Offshore Fishing Report for January

The Offshore Islamorada Fishing Charters have been exciting the last few days here. We catch a wide variety of fish here while fishing in Islamorada, and use quite a few different methods while doing it. Today we went out for some “deep dropping”, where we bottom fish anywhere from 400 – 600′ using multiple hook rigs. The action started right away and by noon we limited out on blueline tilefish, snowy grouper, and yellowedge grouper. These are the only grouper we can keep down here while deep sea fishing in Islamorada right now since the shallow water groupers are closed for harvest until May 1st. We then headed in for a little bit of January Reef Fishing in Islamorada and caught a keeper mutton snapper and a few other fish. Yesterday we fished 2 trips and in the morning we caught our limit of kingfish and a couple of barracuda. In the Afternoon they guys really wanted sailfish, and I explained that the Florida Keys Sailfishing had been a little tough the last few days, but they said they wanted to take the chance and knew there was a possibility we wouldn’t get any bites. After a few slow hours we finally caught a tuna and a decent snapper, and then finally got a bite from a sailfish. We released the Islamorada Sailfish after a 30 minute acrobatic fight and put the baits back out for a few more minutes. It wasn’t 2 minutes later till we hooked another sailfish and after a 10 minute fight we released our 2nd sailfish of the trip. Get on down here for some Islamorada Fishing Charters soon!

Capt. Nick Stanczyk

bnmcharters@gmail.com