Got out today with Gus and his friend Rick who is a local offshore captain of the Sea Horse charter boat. November fishing in Key Largo is often pretty good especially in the backcountry. One of the reasons I like it so much is Key Largo is fairly empty this time of year… September through Christmas, aside from a few holiday weekends, are not too busy and especially this year with Hurricane Irma, so when you get on the water you often have things to yourself. This was the case today as we fished on a Monday as well to avoid the weekend wanna-bes. Gus visits his friend Rick in Key largo at least once a year and loves to snook fish, so we headed out to do that. I had caught some good bait the previous day for inshore fishing key largo, which were pilchards. Snook go crazy for them, especially this time of year. We hit several creek mouths and runoffs in the key largo backcountry, and the first few places we stopped all held fish. The water was just beautiful, some of the best I’d seen since the hurricane, so that is welcome news. We’d been dealing with a lot of nasty algae water since the storm due to all the dead rotting grass and such, but hopefully that means its clearing up. The snook were plentiful and we even found a few sea trout. Trout fishing in the bays of key largo had been a little tougher lately, due to the aforementioned algae water, so these guys were a welcome surprise. We didn’t kill anything and released all the fish unharmed. Later on we found a few more snook on the top of the tide, fishing some of the shorelines of key largo, we also got a cool juvenile redfish too. At the end of the day we found a bunch of smaller tarpon too, however they didn’t want to play with us. We tried a few different tactics to catch them, including drifting free lined baits, anchoring in the rolling schools, and even trying to chum a little bit with the few baits we had left, but no love from them at all. We did get a small 50 lb bull shark though which was cool. Anyways it was a great day I think we landed over 20 snook, a half dozen trout, and a redfish, so great fishing!
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
