Sorry I’ve been so infrequent with these reports. I’m trying to get back on the bandwagon of writting these and uploading all the cool fishing photos. It’s just time consuming, so it’s hard to do every day. Anyway, the drift fishing in Fort Lauderdale has been outstanding this month. All month we’ve been getting kingfish, bonito, yellowtail snappers, schoolie mahi-mahi, and even blackfin tuna. The drift fishing has been very productive for us on the reefs lately.
Ballyhoo, sardines and calamari are what’s on the menu for the fish these days. I love that our boat uses dead sardines. Most head boats do not use these wonderful little baits because they do cost a pretty penny. They are definetly the most oily and smelly bait there is and the fish absolutely love them. Kingfish WILL NOT turn down a beautiful dead sardine dangled in front of his mouth. The kingfish action has on the drift fishing trips has been literally awesome. We’ve been finding the schools of kingfish on all the daytime drift trips lately.
Night fishing has been slow for kingfish, which is why it’s so much better to go anchor fishing at night. Much more variety is caught anchor fishing at night than drift fishing at night. Snappers especially have been biting well, yellowtail, mutton and even mangroves. The mangrove bite has been unbelievable this summer. We’ve been anchoring out a little bit deeper than we used to on the night anchor fishing trip and I think we may have just stumbled onto something. It seems the mangrove snapper, although traditionally a very shallow water snapper, actually move out into the deeper waters at night. This is good news for us, because we’ve got some awesome spots in that depth and our customers have been bringing in some really large mangrove snappers.
A few groupers have been hitting the docks these past few days. I’ve seen some red groupers, black groupers and even some scamp groupers being caught lately on both the daytime and the nighttime trips. The pool winning fish today was a big red grouper that weighed about 12 pounds. We caught 2 others on the same trip that were so close in weight, we had to weight them down to the ounce. That is a really good sign to see those bigger grouper showing up around Fort Lauderdale and Miami.
Lastly, I’ll tell you all about the blackfin tuna bite. All week, we’ve been hearing blackfin tunas have been biting down south of us in Miami. The schools of the fish are travelling north and I think they just started showing up today. We may have a real good blackfin tuna bite this week and next. Get ready for some good tuna action on our day drift fishing party boat trips out of Fort Lauderdale. Sea you out there for some good Deep Sea Fishing.
