Got out for a fun fishing day today with my dad and friend Capt. Dave. It is the last day we will likely have the very cool water temperatures as things are starting to get back on a warming trend. This is ideal conditions for catching big key largo black drum! They love it cold and when it is calm the water gets nice so you can have a good shot at getting one. We had to work at it but we got a nice 20 lber or so, very good fish on light tackle! The trick for drum is working a nice live shrimp very slowly on the bottom. They like hard bottom so areas where you can feel that roughness when you jig are usually good. I like to keep the bait fairly still and just twitch it every 15 seconds or so. If you don’t get a bite in a couple minutes, then try to recast. We occasionally throw a few shrimp bits out for chum too, that can be of help. But thats not all we caught today…. We caught a bunch of redfish and some snook too! Several nice 8-12 lb snook and plenty of medium sized guys. And the redfishing in key largo has gotten so much better since hurricane IRMA. We’ve really had lots of new structure created that holds fish. It also cleaned out many areas that had been silted up over the years, so now you have good hard exposed bottom that the fish crave. We found fish in quite a few areas today, and I know many other guides had good days fishing as well. Some areas I hadn’t hit much lately were holding fish which was great to see. You never know when you need those little aces in the hole. If you are down in Key Largo this next week give me a shout, I don’t have anything on the books until the 23rd and fishing has been very good as you can see from my recent reports.
Capt. Rick Stanczyk
Instagram: @richardstanczyk
Facebook: Islamorada Tarpon Fishing
