3/1/11 Florida Tarpon Fishing, sharks, mackerels, snappers, and more!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk fished two half days on this first day of March, and had a great day to ring in the new month and start of spring!  This morning he fished Bob and Sue, who stayed the night at Bud n' Mary's and fished the day before in the backcountry, catching plenty of redfish, trout, and ladyfish.  They wanted to try something different so we took them out on the edge of the gulf.  Caught some mackerels, bigger ladyfish, and blue runners.  Also caught them 3 nice size blacktip sharks.  Caught a tide change in the middle, though the end of the fall and beginning of the rise was good fishing!  This afternoon Rick took Brent and his son-in-law kyle out for some florida keys fishing for dinner and caught them their limit of nice mangrove snappers!  They also caught a handful of mackerel, blue runners, and groupers too.  They wanted to catch a shark, so we went to one of the edges of the banks where the current was running pretty good and put out the few chunks of mackerel we had.  While rigging the 2nd rod up, the first conventional started going click-click-click-click!  Rick handed the rod to Brent, and said "lock it up in 10 seconds" figuring it was a shark.  All of a sudden - BOOM - big splash behind the boat and a nice 60 lb tarpon!  We caught him in about 15 minutes and got a nice picture of him and released him unharmed. We also caught a nice blacktip again after that for Kyle.  Great way to end a day of fabulous fishing in islamorada with a nice florida keys tarpon!!!  Capt. Jim Willcox also reported good fishign in the backcountry, trout, ladyfish, snappers, sharks, and caught another big 'mud marlin' as well!  Capt. Perry Scuderi also reported good action around the bridges for mackerel, ladyfish, bluefish, and caught a big 250+ lb goliath grouper in the channels near the bridges!

Capt. Rick Stanczyk
305-747-6903
rick@seethefloridakeys.net
http://www.budnmarys.com

Great weather, great fishing on the patches! 1/3/11

With the winds dying out and blowing around 10 mph out of the north, it's been fairly calm out front for a little Florida Keys Fishing.  Capt. Rick Stanczyk fished a half day this morning and did well on some shallow patches.  Shrimp was the bait of choice as well as a few chunks of ballyhoo.  We caught plenty of mangrove snappers along with a handful of nice ones, lots of blue runners, yellowtail, some smaller grouper varieties, some spanish mackerel, porgies, and 8 or so 6-10 lb jack crevalles.  Very fun on light tackle!!!  It was calm enough to go out a little further as the report from yesterday was the kingfish were biting so good they were eating jigs with shrimp, however we didn't have any luck doing that the last 45 minutes of our day, so we headed in to end our day of Islamorada Fishing.  We caught plenty of fish for lunch and sent the boys over to lazy days for some lazy days style snapper!  Capt. Skip Nielsen also reported similar catches from the day before, he also caught some nice cudas around the lighthouse as well as some king mackerel!