7/27/12 Islamorada tarpon fishing in July and backcountry fishing!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk had Brad, Shane, and Richard for several trips the past week.  Day 1 we fished a full day in the everglades backcountry fishing, catching plenty of trout, snappers, ladyfish, jacks - lots of rod bending action.  We put Richard on a big 200+ lb sawfish.  The sawfish had a cobia on him as well, about 15 lbs, which we got a hook in but spit the bait and disappeared!  We later caught a nice redfish and pulled on a couple sharks.  We then had some tarpon fishing to do, which coincided with the lobster mini season.  We went very early one morning at 4 am.  The tarpon in islamorada were not happy and it was slick calm with bully netters lighting things up everywhere!  No bites unfortunately...  But we made up for it later that evening, and caught 3 out of 4 tarpon.  2 on frozen mullets, and 2 other bites drifting crabs!  We also caught a couple big jacks and a sting ray.  The guys had so much fun they wanted to do it again the next night, and we got 2 more nice tarpon, and a big nurse shark.  They also fished offshore with the Redfish, Capt. Merv Finch, and caught some nice schoolie dolphin and a couple bigger slammers!  Today we had Erik Munchnick and family out for some fishing in the florida keys flats.  We caught some nice big trout and mangrove snappers on the edge of the gulf.  Drift some baits for some tarpon but no luck.  We hit a hole off east cape sable and the big goliaths were there - unfortunately no heavy duty tackle since I hadn't been catching these fish in there as of late, we broke 3 off in the rocks but did manage to get a 175 lber up to the boat!  Lots of little blacktips swarming the area as well.  We then ran back towards flamingo fishing and caught several nice big redfish up to 12 lbs on the edge of some banks to end the day!  They were eating GULPs and shrimps.