Wow, a 65 pound cobia caught on our drift fishing boat, the Catch My Drift.  A very nice cobia, about as big as we ever catch them.  We were fishing the reef in about 100′ of water when the cobia swam up.  We all saw him there on the surface and everyone frantically tried to get their baits in front of him.  It was amazing that everyone throwing everything but the rods themselves at the fish, he didn’t get spooked.  It looked like a shark on the surface at first and them someone yelled cobia and we knew what it was.  Anyway, he took the bait and took a dive.  Fish fought pretty hard for a little while, but we got him to the boat pretty quickly. 

The real fight started when we gaffed him.  No I don’t know if you’ve ever gaffed a cobia before, but to pull a 65 pound cobia 10 feet over the rail of a drift boat when the fish is going ballistic is NOT EASY.  We got him into the boat after a few pulled muscles and clubbed him to get him to stop beating us all up.  Wow, what a beauty.  Most of the cobia we catch throughout the year are after Thanksgiving.  I guess this one was early.

I never get any photos of our night snapper trips because they come in so late, but Capt. Chuck was going out with a couple of his buddies(not working, just for fun) so I sent him out with the camera to get a few pictures for the blog.  They caught a lot of yellowtail snappers and some other critters.  There were a few nice mangroves caught, lots of yellowtail snapper, one big mutton and tons of other little reef critters we threw back like little grunts, squirrel fish, triggers and a pesky eel.  The night trips have been doing good and if your up for action, the night anchor trip is the trip for you.

By the way, this is a picture of Capt. Chuck, hahahahah.

That’s right, we caught 2 sharks on the same rig while sharking off Port Everglades on our fishing trip yesterday.  Pretty bizzare for us.  It certainly doesn’t happen every trip.  The sharks were both pretty dang big and this guy didn’t just have to fight one big fish, he had to fight both of ‘em.  A great job done by all and a really nice shark.  This was the fish I told you about in my last blog report, but I just got the pictures emailed to me. 

What a beauty and lemme tell you, this fish fought his butt off.  You can see in the picture how bent over the rod is, and thats one of the biggest rods they make.  It takes a pretty large fish to bend a rod like that over.  Good job to the crew and angler for catching them, and some really big kingfish too.  This other curious fish is a jack crevelle, a fish we normally catch in the intercoastal waterway, but this one was offshore a bit.  Great day of fishing.

The Fort Lauderdale sportfishing boats came in with a couple big sharks today and yesterday.  The big sharks are still coming through the area and they are hungry.  The sharks showed up late this year, but they are still migrating through in strong numbers.  The action on them has been awesome.  Today, and I’ll have to wait for the customer to email me the pictures, we caught 2 sharks on the same rig simultaneously.  It was incredible, we were fighting one shark and the bait was kind of hanging out of his mouth.  Another shark came up and ate the chunk of meat hanging out of his mouth and got hooked himself.  It was a very unusual catch for us.  We also caught a big amberjack along with this shark.  A very good day of sportfishing out there off Ft. Lauderdale.

We caught a lot of kings this week on the Catch My Drift and the Mary B III.  We’ve been drifting on the outside edge of the reef with dead ballyhoo and sardines.  The best bite has been just north of Port Everglades in about 140′ of water.  I’ve seen a lot of bait getting chased around out there.  I heard of some nice wahoo being caught this week too.  My buddy caught a 60 pounder on his boat the other day and I heard of a couple other nice wahoo caught this week as well.  A few nice fish around the shipwrecks are biting.  Big amberjacks, nice mutton snappers and a few groupers are being caught.  All in all, the fishing is pretty good. 

We had a group of students from Nova Southeastern charter the Mary B yesterday for a group fishing trip.  It was a fun trip and a lot was caught.  We caught some kings and bonitos on the reef.  Then we moved offshore to do some bottom fishing.  We ended up catching a bunch of really nice vermillion snapper.  Some of them were pretty big ones too.  The highlight of the trip was a huge amberjack that bit an unsuspecting anglers rod.  it was a really big one and it fought HARD!  A very nice fish and a great trip, thanks for coming out with us guys. 

Check this out.  Now, there are a few trips a year that really astound me, and this trip last night absolutely did for me.  Our luck on our swordfish trips lately has been kinda down these past few weeks.  The past few Friday nights hasn’t been that good for us.  Last week we fished the Sword Lords Tournament and we hooked into3 fish, but unfortunately pulled the hooks on all 3 fish.  Needless to say, our luck has been down for about 3 weeks now.  But we were due.  We were due for a good trip and last night was it!  We slammed them.  Caught 5 swordfish on our trip last night.

The first fish we caught was small, so we brought him close to the boat, and cut the line.  He was small and definetly not a legal fish so we released him.  The drift was funny last night and it was difficult to put our lines out there.  As we were resetting the lines from the first fish we caught, we got another bite.  We caught that fish, set the lines out again and Bam!  Immediately got another bite.  The fish were biting last night.  I don’t think we actually ever managed to get all the lines back out again during the entire night, the fish were biting so good. 

We ended up catching 5 swordfish last night guys.  So far, in the year and a half we’ve been running the Friday Night Swordfishing trip, this has been our best night on numbers of fish.  Fort Lauderdale swordfishing is going off and we weren’t the only boat to catch them either.  I heard a few other boats catching them too, so swordfishing is hot right now.  Of the keeper sized swordfish we caught, the smallest was about a 50 pounder and the biggest was a 64″ forklength fish, estimated at 140 pounds.  Awesome night for us guys.  We’re headed out again next Friday so we’ll see you all out there.  Good luck…

Wow, the fishing is still exceptional off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale.  Usually by now it starts to slack off for a few weeks before the mullet run, but the fish are still biting like mad dogs.  Bonitos, which were few and far between last year, bit better this year than the past 5 years.  Kingfish are too and I was really expecting to see a dropoff on the kingfish bite this year.  It never happened.  In fact, we caught more kings this summer than we did all year last year.  Kings and bonitos aren’t the only fish biting either.  We’re catching lots of snapper, both mutton and yellowtail, and some big blackfin tunas.  Its been a great year for us and the fishing doesn’t seem to be slowing at all for us. 

The Drift boats had some good catches on kings this week.  Most of the kings were between 6-10 pounds and a couple of them were over 15 pounds.  Some nice ones out there.  Also for those anglers that fished their baits a little deeper, a mutton or two was caught on every trip this week.  Its starting to look a lot like mutton season, get ready for the spawn.  It’ll happen any day now.  Drift fishing has been good this week.

Sportfishing has been awesome too.  Lots and lots of action on the reef with bonitos and kings.  These guys had non stop action on their trip.  They were all gonna go drift fishing but they opted to charter a sportfishing boat instead.  I think they are glad they did, cause they caught a ton of fish.  Not too shabby for a half day fishing trip.

This sportfishing trip was just unspeakable.  A huge game shark was caught, about a 6 footer.  Also a giant barracuda and some nice kings and bonitos.  There wasn’t much time on this trip for fishing, they were too busy catching.  Fort Lauderdale fishing has been great everyone, so get out there and try a fishing trip.  They are snapping!

The drift boats continue to outfish the rest of the fleet.  Coming in with more than 2 times the amount of fish of every other boat in town.  Great catches of bonito, mutton snapper, kingfish, and blackfin tuna.  Fort Lauderdale party boat fishing in the summer is the best chance at catching lots of fish this time of year.  Our boat the Catch My Drift has been catching great catches on morning, afternoon and night trips.  Here is a picture of the fish we caught yesterday.

One of our customers fought this big blackfin tuna for over 40 minutes yesterday while fishing aboard the Catch My Drift.  The fish weighed about 37 pounds and it took every bit of muscle this guy had to catch it.  Beautiful fish and some nice kingfish on the same trip.

Kevin, one of the fishing guides on the trip, wanted to get his picture taken with the fish too.   This is Kevin:

Anyway guys, thanks for reading my Ft. Lauderdale fishing report.  Hope to see you out with us in the coming weeks.  I’ll write another report tommorrow.

The action is still here.  We caught a lot of bonitos and kings these past couple days.  Here are a few pictures of the awesome drift boat catches we had yesterday.  Lots and lots of bonitos and some decent sized kings.  The deep sea fishing on the reef is where the action is this time of year, and a good catch is all but guaranteed.  We did have one afternoon this week when we couldn’t get a bite(we caught a few little snappers but nothing else).  I think it was because the navy was doing some submarine exercises off Fort Lauderdale beach that day and their sonar was messing with the fish bite.  The rest of the days these past few days were great. 

Mutton snappers have been biting during the day trips a little bit as are some yellowtails.  Our night time anchor trip that we run every night has reported a lot of Mangrove snappers biting and some yellowtails.  A few muttons as well have been caught during out night time anchor fishing trip as well. 

 Our Wednesday All day trip this week was a hoot.  We caught all of these fish, PLUS we caught 2 sailfish.  We actually had 4 sailfish on during this trip, but only managed to catch 2.  Well, I ain’t complaining.  2 sailfish in the same trip during August is just plain awesome.  Heck, it wouldn’t be a bad day for sailfishing off Ft. Lauderdale during the winter when the sailfishing action is red hot. 

Sportfishing boats have been doing good, but the drift boats have been getting more action.  The sportfishing boats have been catching some big barracudas though, which this drift boats haven’t been getting.  Some nice amberjacks are showing up around some of the wrecks too. 

We’re going out on the swordfishing tournament tonight so wish us luck.  I’ll try to give a report about how we did in the tournament if we catch anything.  See ya all tommorrow.

Guys,

We are setting out on Saturday night to fish the swordfish tournament off Ft. Lauderdale.  It should be a great night and as you know, with the success of our Friday Night Swordfishing trips that we run every week, we’ve been having some good luck.  Capt. Adam is going to be running the trip and we’ve got a bunch of the guys that always fish the Friday night trip with us going out there to try their luck.  I think there is a couple spots open still for the trip if anyone wanted to get on with us.  I don’t know all the particulars of the trip, but if you are interested call Adam about it.  (954)295-3692  He’s handling the trip down to the nitty gritty, not me, so if you have any questions about the trip or if you want to get on it, call him up and ask.  He says he’s got a good shot in it and I for one would have to agree.  There aren’t many guys that swordfish half as much as he does, and the fish he’s been bringing in would have won a lot of the tournaments lately.  Anyway, wish us luck, we’ll be out Friday night on the open boat swordfish trip and then again on the Saturday night Sword fishing tournament.  Good luck to everybody fishing it, it should be a fun night.

Fort Lauderdale must have a fish magnet buries deep beneath the reef because the fish are coming from all over.  This week has been crazy fishing.  Drift fishing on the reef has been absolutely phenomenal.  I haven’t seen the fishing this good for over 10 years.  I would say that today we caught too many fish to count, but we took the time to count them anyway.  68 bonitos in a single trip.  Yes thats right, over 68 bonitos caught on our 4 hour drift fishing charter right here off Ft. Lauderdale beach.  We also caught 6 kingfish and a nice mutton snapper and thats not to mention how many fish we had on and missed or lost behind the boat.  I would like to say that we catch this many fish every day, but this day was an exceptional one.  This time of year the fishing on the reef is really good and we usually catch a nice box of fish, but today was above and beyond for us. 

Our sport fishing boats are catching some good ones too.  Capt. Eric caught plenty of big bonitos and kings as well as a huge trophy sized barracuda.  A couple of the fish we were catching lost their tails on the way in by bigger game fish, so we set out a live bait and caught a giant barracuda.  Perfect set of teeth on this fish. 

On most of our charters lately we’ve been catching a ton of bonitos and kingfish on the reef.  We love it when everyone on the boat gets to catch a couple.  Then we turn our efforts over to bigger game fish and target sharks, barracuda, amberjack and sailfish.  This strategy has been good and everyone that has come out with us lately has come in with good catches. 

 Side note:  I’m back from my Alaska cruise and let me tell you it was awesome.  Beautiful mountains, rivers, glaciers, forests and wildlife.  I saw so many salmon in some of the streams you could literally walk on them.  The fish had no room but to swim pretty much on top of eachother.  I highly reccomend the cruise if you ever get a chance to go, Alaska is a beautiful place.  I’m taking the fishing report writing back over from here on out, so expect more frequent reports and photos.  Thanks everyone for reading my blog.  See ya tommorrow…