There has been a lot of action on the Fort Lauderdale reefs this week.  Our sportfishing charter boat, the Big Game, has been coming back to the dock with an abundance of kingfish on most trips.  Kingfish are migrating now, in 80′-120′ of water and are biting just about everything: strip baits, ballyhoo, spoons, sardines.  The good thing is that catching everyone at least a few fish on our deep sea fishing charters has been quite easy for us.  Along with the kingfish, there have been some bonitos, barracuda and sometimes tuna. 

Sailfish are still in full swing.  The sailfish winter bite is on, and Fishing Headquarters has been catching more than their share of them.  Last week, one of  our sportfishing boats, the Keeping It Reel, caught a sailfish on every deep sea fishing charter they had, all week long.  That’s a pretty nice winning streak for catching sailfish, even for this time of year.  Sailfish are biting best 140′ deep on live baits. 

Mahi-Mahi are still around offshore too.  With the good action in on the reef, most charter boats are staying closer to the reef, rather than venturing offshore in search of mahi-mahi.  We’ve had a few fishermen aboard our charters recently that really wanted to go offshore trolling, so we went out there anyway.  We’ll we’re glad we did because the dolphin fishing is still red hot.  Dolphin have been stacking up on offshore weed lines and color changes.  Trolling has been very productive because we can cover a lot of territory while we’re out there.  Our Wednesday All Day Dolphin trip has had a few good weeks in a row, with good mahi-mahi catches and a few wahoo.  You can’t beat the price of our Wednesday All Day Trip, only $65 for a full day of offshore sportfishing. 

The sharks are here!  Sharks are beginning to show up on the edge of the gulfstream.  They aren’t here in great numbers yet, but there are a few around.  Shark season is just around the corner and I think we’re going to have a great year on sharks.  Last year, the hammerheads and sand bar sharks bit spectacular. We even caught some tiger sharks last year and we almost never catch those.  We’ll see.  Until then, the fishing is good now, so give me a call and book your fishing adventure today. 

Drift Fishing Report

The drift fishing on the reef lately has been a mix of kingfish and snappers.  Kingfish, averaging 6-10 pounds, are biting well on the morning and afternoon trips.  They’ve been biting on sardines the best, at least the bigger ones have been.  The bite has been in 80-120′ of water and most of our fish have been caught just south of the inlet on the outside edge of the reef.  Snappers too are being caught on our drift fishing trips.  Those fishermen fishing bottom rigs are catching yellowtail snappers fairly well and the occassional bigger mutton snapper.

A fish we don’t get everyday out there, cobia, are starting to bite out there too.  Cobia are traditionally a bottom dweller, that actually make their living by following around sting rays.  A school of cobia will follow behind a big sting ray and watch for it to uncover a crab or fish or shrimp that was hiding in the sand.  As soon as they see it, they gobble it up.  You can catch a cobia on the surface also.  Cobias might like to follow sting rays to get food, but The Stingray Buffet is hardly the only fast food restaurant in the ocean.  Cobia will occassionally rise to the surface to grab a quick snack. 

A lot of the cobia we catch on the surface are alone and when we catch them around stingrays or on the bottom, they are usually in schools.  On one of our drift fishing trips the other day, we were fishing the reef when a customer yells out, “Shark on the surface”.  Capt. Vic took a quick glance and shouted back, “Cobia! Cobia!”.  It was a mad casting frenzy, but before anyone could throw their line towards the fish, the cobia swam right over to the sardine closest to him and ate.  It was a nice cobia, about a 35 pounder, and we caught him in only about 4 or 5 minutes.  Nice fish caught aboard the Catch My Drift.

We’ve mainly been catching kingfish, snapper, grouper, cobia, and a few tunas on the drift boat trips.  It’s been great on some days and slower on others, but we always bring back fish.  Night fishing has been great snapper fishing.  I’m going to write a night fishing report tommorrow.

Sportfishing Report

The sailfish bite is still on, and I think this is the second cold front of the year.  Sailfish love the cold weather and whenever we get a cold spell, the sailfish always snap.  The next few days should be some awesome sailfish fishing in South Florida.  One of our boats, the Keeping it Reel, has caught a sailfish on every single charter this week.  Sailfish are biting while kite fishing with live baits and trolling artificial lures.  When the sailfish are biting trolling baits, I usually just assume troll for them, because you can cover a lot more ground out there.  Also, trolling usually yields good catches of king mackeral and sometimes wahoo and mahi-mahi.

There are 2 types of fish that bite exceptionally well in November, and both of these fish are fairly rare the rest of the year: wahoo and cobia.  I call wahoo and cobia the Thanksgiving fish.  Wahoo are an offshore fish that are usually caught on our offshore dolphin fishing trips, 700-900′ of water.  In November, we usually catch them just 1-2 miles offshore, in only 180′-300′ of water.  This is a great season to go high speed trolling for wahoo.  Wahoo love to bite at really fast speeds.  My favorite speed to troll for wahoo is 14 knots(about 18 miles per hour).  That’s very fast for any kind of fishing, but it is the best method of targeting wahoo.  Wahoo are the fastest fish in the ocean.

Cobia fishing is great this time of year too.  We catch cobia around the shipwrecks usually.  No catches of cobia on our sportfishing charters this week, but the head boats are catching them.  They will show up on the shipwrecks soon enough for us, and then we’ll be catching them good.  Around the wrecks, there have been some very nice fish.  A lot of huge amberjacks are starting to show up on the 200′+ shipwrecks.  Really big groupers are being caught on the deeper shipwrecks.  We caught this 35 lb. back grouper on a 250′ shipwreck off Fort Lauderdale.  Judging by the way it was fighting, I was absolutely certain that it was a huge amberjack.  Capt. Adam guessed it to be a grouper.  I knew I was wrong when I saw the fish pop up on the surface.  Very nice catch. 

The deep wrecks are holding amberjacks and groupers, but the shallow wrecks are holding big barracuda.  If your a meat fisherman, than you probably don’t like to catch these.  If your a light tackle enthusiast, you won’t find a fish that’s more fun to catch.  Barracudas are hanging around the shallow wrecks right now and they are huge.  The summer barracuda are usually like 20-25 inches long, but the big fall and winter barracuda are the 40+ inches.  I’m glad barracudas don’t get any bigger than they do, there wouldn’t be any fish left in the ocean. 

I would have to say, great fishing on both the drift fishing and the sportfishing boats.  Sharks will be here soon, and sailfish should be hanging around for a while.  It’s going to be a good season on fishing.  Sea ya out there…

Our sportfishing boats have been doing well on every trip this week.  The mullet have begun to make their run down the South Florida coast and with them, come the big sailfish and shark migration.  The canals in the Fort Lauderdale Intracoastal Waterway are all packed with finger mullet, which is the undeniable sign that the mullet are making their run down the beach.  They do this every year and always bring with them the same big game predator fish, following them.  I’ll definitely be trying a little beach fishing in the mornings, fishing for tarpon and sharks, until the lifeguard kicks me out at 7:30AM.  Then, a few minutes late for work, I’ll be heading out on a sportfishing charter to do some sailfishing.

Sailfish are snapping this past week.  We’ve caught at least 1 sailfish on every trip this week.  I hope we stay on this sailfish streak for a while.  Almost every sailfish this week, we’ve caught trolling.  A couple fish on the kites have been landed, but most have been on the troll.  Live baiting is usually the best method of catching sailfish.  The great thing about trolling is that you can catch kingfish, tuna and mahi-mahi on the troll also.  The mahi-mahi bite lately is a different story.

 Offshore fishing in Ft Lauderdale this whole month has been awesome.  There have been a lot of weed lines formed up offshore as well as scattered debris.  The dolphins seem to be all over the place.  I’ve noticed lately that there have not been as many boats fishing offshore.  Less charters around with a slow economy, fuel was expensive for a while, etc…  With not so many boats competing for fishing grounds, our overall catches have been outstanding.  Big dolphin and lots of smaller ones are out there to be caught.  Just spend some time fishing for them offshore and a good captain can usually find something that will hold some fish. 

Finding a piece of debris floating offshore is like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  You know, when you find something offshore, if it hasn’t been molested by 10 other boats already, it’s going to have some nice fish around it.  We’ve had some spectacular dolphin fishing days this year, made spectacular by spotting a tiny floating board- Needle in a haystack.  On a couple of our trips, we’ve caught 20 or 30 dolphins and caught our limit of wahoo.  On a couple other trips, we’ve come back with a couple dolphins over 20 or 30 pounds.  There are some fish out there if you look for them.

Now you can catch dolphin just trolling around too.    I’ve hit some of my biggest single dolphin and some great schools of schoolies, by just “Out of the Blue” offshore trolling.  But no fisherman can deny, the secret to dolphin is finding the right fishing grounds.  One of my secret techniques for dolphin is to always have a bailing rod out with a small live bait or chunk bait, whenever I’m bottom fishing.  You can set it out there on top and just forget about it.  You would be very surprised how often a school of mahi-mahi swims up on you when you’re dropping baits around a wreck.  

Bottom fishing has been productive too.  The shallow wrecks in about 90-160′ of water are holding black and gag groupers.  They are very aggressive and will eat live or dead baits.  I always use very heavy tackle for grouper because the first thing every grouper tries to do is to wrap you in the rocks.  You’ve got to ‘make or break’ that fish right at the hookup and get him up a few feet off the bottom.  Then you can back your drag down and fight him, but it’s no fun fighting a rock.  There have been some really big groupers around some the wrecks and the vermillion snappers are always biting out here it seems.  There is a lot of action on the little 1-2 pound red snappers if you want to catch a lot of tasty fish.

Fishing this season has been excellent for us and I really believe that this will be a great year for sailfish for us.  The numbers already are great and we’ve only been through 1 cold front.  The second and 3rd cold fronts of the year are when we get the crazy “10 sailfish in a half day” catches out here.  We should know soon, there’s a cold front on its way here.  I can feel it.  Good fishing everyone, sea ya on the water.

We’ve had a couple interesting catching on our sportfishing trips this week, so I thought I’d write a quick fishing report.  Just about anything you could want to catch is biting right now.  There’s been some kingfish and bonito action trolling the reef, snappers and groupers biting on the bottom around the shipwrecks and rock piles, dophin are scattered offshore with some wahoos mixed in, and for the big game fishermen out there, sharks and sailfish are here too.  There’s been a smorgasbord of fish species being caught right now. 

My game plan lately has been to just catch everything that swims.  The reef is always a good place to start on any fishing trip.  You can usually bend the rod so everyone on the boat gets to catch some fish.  After everyone has caught a few fish, I like to hit the shipwrecks.  It’s a good spot to catch snapper and grouper for those folks looking to fill their freezers, and a  good spot to drop a big live bait for those folks looking to catch big game fish like amberjack and barracuda.  For a half day fishing trip, its a great way to come in with a good bunch of fish. 

If we’ve got a longer trip, like a 6 or an hour charter, I usually love to stick my nose offshore and see if we can get lucky with dolphin and wahoo.  We’ve been very successful on a few trips this month by finding some big boards floating offshore.  The wahoos and dolphins are usually stacked up on it and you can catch a ton of great eating fish.  You really need some time to look around offshore if you want to be successful with dolphin fishing.

The shallow wrecks have had some huge barracuda around them this month.  It’s a blast to take a 12 lb. spinning rod and hook into a 45″ barracuda.  They make some hellatious jumps and fast runs.  We usually use some 1-2 lb baby tunas for live bait and put them on the downrigger, about 15 feet off the ocean bottom.  Drag the downrigger right over the top of the shipwreck and chances are good of hooking into a big barracuda, amberjack or even a rare grouper.

This picture is of a giant golden tilefish that we caught when we made some electric reel deep drops in 900′ of water.  We caught this 14 pound tilefish and about 30 of these little 1-2 pound, yellow-eyed, red grouper fish that I’ve never caught before.  There are some strange fish in that depth of water. 

I had a great trip this weekend with a good customer of mine that charters me every year for a couple days of sportfishing.  His name is Erik and he designed a special gimbal to fit with his wheelchair.  Well, Erik charted us for 3 all day trips in a row this last weekend. Erik is the kind of guy that just likes to catch anything, no matter what it is.  Well, I am too, but this is the 3rd year in a row he has fished with us and he has still not caught a sailfish.  This year, no matter what, I really wanted to catch him a sailfish. 

The first day we went out, we started off catching live ballyhoo at the bait buoy.  We caught a lot of them, quite quickly.  The water that day was “puke” green in color and did not look very “sailfishy” in on the reef.  So I decided to head offshore until we found some cleaner water.  The blue water edge was in about 500′ that day with a nice weedline stacked up on it.  We put out the live ballyhoos and dragged them slowly to the north.  It wasn’t long before we got jumped by a school of hungry mahi-mahi.  I think we caught 3 in the first school and then another couple a half hour later.  The current was pushing HARD to the north, and we were off Pompano beach, so I decided to try a little bit of shipwreck fishing at some artificial reefs I know in that area.  We dropped live bonitos and blue runners at 5 or 6 different shipwrecks, but we couldn’t buy a bite that day. 

So after a slow afternoon, we decided to start trolling back to the south along the reef.  The water was still ugly green in color, but the kingfish like that kind of water sometimes.  We hit a couple nice kingfish on the troll home, and oddly enough, a nice mahi-mahi too in only 65′ of water.  That’s shallow for dolphin fish.  Just as I trolled the baits over a 130′ shipwreck, my high line comes out of the rigger.  I grabbed the rod and jigged it a couple times, and I feel a small thump.  Having just passed over the shipwreck, I figured it was a small 1 pound bonito or something.  So I do a quick drop back and when I come tight, the fish starts pulling drag…  a lot of drag.  Like a rocket launching into space, a sailfish plows through the water’s surface and does a belly flop.  I’m up on the bridge holding the rod, screaming “Sailfish!  Sailfish!”   This was the fish I really wanted to catch Erik this year, and this was it!  I handed the rod down and Chuck, my mate was helping Erik get set up with the rod.  The fish kept dumping us, taking more and more line off the spool.  Just as we get set up to start fighting this fish, we pulled the hooks.  What a drag.  It was a heartbreaker for us, but I knew I had 2 more days to get him one, and there were obviously a few sailfish around. 

The next day was really slow fishing for us.  It started out slow when we couldn’t even catch bait.  They never came up for us at the bait buoy.  We did some trolling and caught a few kingfish and a couple medium sized mahi-mahi early on in the trip.  After that, we tried some sailfish with the kite fishing technique.  An hour of kite fishing with no bites, and I decided to go try some trolling offshore.  We trolled the rest of the trip, and caught a small tuna and not much else.  It was a slow, slow day and I was a bit disapointed. 

We still had one more day of fishing and I was the mate on this trip. I got my dad, Capt. Paul to the run the charter with me that day and I’m glad I did.  My dad has been a full time charter captain in south Florida longer than anyone and he is a really good fisherman.  We caught some live baits, and they came up for us good.  Trolling the reef to start, we caught a kingfish or 2, but not much.  So we decided to try dragging some live ballyhoo around on a nice color change edge in about 200′ of water.  We weren’t fishing long, when we see a dark colored fin right behind one of the baits.  “SSailfish on the left rigger”  I head coming from the bridge.  We all look back there and there he was.  It was a small sailfish, but where sailfish are concerned, it doesn’t matter how big the fish is, the feat is to just catch one.  I grabbed the rod and tried to hook him, a few different times.  I kept “woofing the fish”.  So another kid on the boat, Kevin, grabs another rod and winds the bait right in front of the sailfish.  Of coarse, he hooks the fish on his first try.  We strap Erik in with the rod and this fish we caught!  Erik’s first sailfish in I don’t know how many hours of fishing with me.  Usually I have better odds than that.  We billed the fish quickly and snapped a couple good photos.  We released the sailfish and watched him swim away strong.  The day was made!

We still had a few hours of fishing, so we decided to try our luck trolling offshore for dolphin.  I put out my best spread of rigged baits and we trucked offshore to look for something good to fish along.  We were about 3 miles offshore, when Capt. Paul yelled down, “2 frigate birds circling something ahead of us.  Get ready.”  A second later he yells down, “ There’s something floating here.  Something big.  Woah!  This looks like the mother load!”  We didn’t even get within 300 feet of this thing floating, when every rod I had out has a fish jumping on it.  There were a pile of dolphin around the boat.  We had fish jumping all over.  We had more fish on than anglers on the boat.  As soon as we boated a fish, the angler had to grab another rod with a fish on it.  We started pitching spinning rods out there with squids and small live finger mullet as baits.  The dolphin were swalling the baits before they hit the water.  It was nuts.

Nick hooked into about a 60 pound blacktip shark that was swimming around the floating debris that we fought for a while.  He bit us off right next to the boat.  We didn’t mind, since we were going to release him anyway.  After the shark, the dolphin kind of scattered.  So we put out the trolling spread again and started trolling around the debris again.  I couldn’t get a line out for 10 seconds.  We caught wahoo after wahoo after wahoo.  All of them were about 10-20 pounds and they were biting everything I threw out there.  Another shark came up and ate a wahoo as I was leadering him to the boat.  The shark grabbed the wahoo so hard, it cut my hand when the line snapped out of my hand.  I should’ve been wearing gloves, but the action was so hot, it was hard to be careful.  We caught so many wahoo, we limited out, and started to release them.  We were all so exhausted from the hour and a half of literally NON-STOP action.  We caught enough so we decided to head back to the dock.  It was a great day, and we accomplished my goal of catching Erik his first sail.  

We had a really fun time out there and the fishing on the last day was just plain awesome.  This winter is going to be a great season on sailfish.  I’ll try to write a drift fishing report tommorrow for everyone.  Sea you out on the ocean….

Mahi-Mahi have been what’s biting off Fort Lauderdale these past few weeks.  Almost every day we’ve been hitting a school or two out there on our fishing charters.  Most of the mahi-mahi have been 5-8 pounds, just a bit bigger than the normal summer schoolie dolphins.  Very few big ones have been caught.  All the mahi-mahi have been about the same size and traveling in small schools of 6-10 fish.  It’s fun to hit a school of mahi-mahi out there.  You’re trolling along, and out of nowhere 6 fish are behind the boat jumping with a couple more fish swimming right up to the boat.  It can be chaotic at times when there are more fish around the boat than we have anglers to catch them, but I love that kind of chaos. 

Both the sportfishing boats and the drift fishing boats have been getting into the mahi-mahi out there.  On our Wednesday all day dolphin trip this week, we not only caught a nice mess of dolphin, but we also caught a 35 pound wahoo.  That was a nice surprise.  With all the storms activity to the south of us, the Gulf Stream is bringing a lot of debris right into our backyard.  We’ve been finding logs, trees and boards floating out there.  Around the floating debris is almost always a few mahi-mahi or a hungry wahoo.  Beautiful weedlines and color changes have been forming up offshore as well. It’s been really easy to find stuff to fish along side out there. 

On the reef have been some schools of kingfish, bonitos and blackfin tuna.  The tuna have been small guys, around 5 or 6 pounders.  The kingfish average 8-10 pounds with a bigger one here and there.  The kings have started biting really good for us out there.  The morning drift trip caught their limit of kingfish yesterday and the charter sport fishing boats have been catching their limits almost every day.  The fishing is very good in Ft Lauderdale right now, and we have sailfish season to look forward to in October, November and December.  It’s a great time to get out there and do some deep sea fishing.

We went out on the all day dolphin trip the other day and we did pretty good.  We found a nice weedline and got jumped by a couple nice schools of mahi-mahi.  We only had 6 anglers on the boat that day.  Our minimum is 10, but with all the storm activity, it’s been scaring a lot of people away.  We wanted to go out there though, ’cause we’ve been hearing of a lot of scattered debris out there from the hurricane that hit Cuba.  We found a really nice weedline about 7 miles offshore and trolled along it for a majority of the day. It wasn’t red hot action, but we did hit a few nice schools of fish on the trip.  A couple of times, we had more fish on the line than we had anglers for.  There was one school of 20 or so fish, we could have loaded up on if we had more folks on the boat.  We caught a few from the school but they got spooked quickly and swam off.  There are some mahi-mahi offshore right now.  Mostly schoolie sized ones, but man are they good eating.  We even got a couple small blackfin tuna on the trip.  We released a dozed more, but kept a few for some fresh sushi!  Sea ya out there, more on the fishing report tommorrow. 

Well, the dolphin have finally shown up pretty good.  We hit a couple schools out there in the past few days.  There has been a lot of debris floating out there because of all the storm activity to the south of us.  I love trolling out there and finding an entire palm tree floating or a gas grill, haha.  There’s some funny stuff floating out there in the deep sea.  Troll around until you find something cool to fish along, and you’re in the fish.  Mahi-mahi are my favoirite fish to catch offshore and it’s great to go out there and come in with a nice catch.  The Wednesday All Day dolphin trip this week should be great. 

Dolphin are biting offshore, but inshore there are some nice kingfish, snapper and even the sailfish are starting to show up for us.  We’ve been seeing quite a few free jumping sailfish on the reef and we’ve even got to catch a couple this week.  I think that this sailfish season in Ft. Lauderdale will be awesome fishing for us.  The drift boat even caught a sailfish yesterday, so they must be biting, haha.  The fishing is pretty good, so if you have a free day, Let’s Go Fishing!

The fishing is going off in Fort Lauderdale this month.  There has been non stop action on all the different trips we offer.  Our sportfishing trips have been going awesome, drift fishing trips have been full of action, the Wednesday all day dolphin trip has been red hot and the Friday night swordfishing trip has been getting some good ones.  All in all, the fishing in Fort Lauderdale is just plain spectacular. 

I always tell people, in the summer, the weather is hot… and so is the fishing.  The reefs are holding tons and tons and tons of kingfish, bonitos, tunas and other species.  Most of our 4 hour drift fishing trips have been coming in with a load of king mackerals, a box load of bonitos and a few snappers.  If you’ve been waiting for a good time to go out there when the fish will be biting, then wait no more.  The fish are here. 

The sportfishing trips have been coming in with some big game fish as well.  Some sharks, sailfish and big golden amberjacks are still being caught out there.  The sportfishing boats are also bringing in almost as many kingfish and bonitos as the drift fishing boats have been catching.  On this sportfishing trip, we caught our usual assortment of bonitos and kings, as well as this huge cobia you see hanging on the rack.  Talk about a good eating fish, cobia are one of my favorites. 

The great fishing action has pretty much just arrived, so plan on seeing catches like these over the next 4-6 weeks.  Its going to be a helluva summer fishing Fort Lauderdale. 

So this week, I took some friends of mine to the Bahamas for a few days of fishing in Bimini, Chub Cay and Grand Bahama Islands.  It was a fun trip, we caught a ton of big mahi mahi dolphin, lots of snappers and ton of other fish.  We left on Friday morning and fished across the gulfstream towards Bimini.  There wasn’t alot of action for us on the first day.  We found a big frigate bird flying out in the middle of nowhere and as soon as we got close, insta-bite big dolphin.  We hooked 2 nice dolphin.  The bigger one we lost behind the boat was probably a 20 pounder, and the smaller one was about 12.  We caught a couple little baby tunas on the way across also, but we let those go.  Not much action on the first day, but then again our trip had just begun. 

The next day we made it to Chub Cay, where the fishing was much better.  We fished the pocket hard for marlin, wahoo, tuna, dolphin… anything that would bite.  Dolphin were biting good and we caught a few really nice ones.  We also caught a ton of big barracudas which we released.  Marlin was what we really wanted to catch, but not a bite on them. 

The next day, after sleeping off our hangovers from the previous night’s festivities, we went out for some deep drop bottom fishing.  I have some good GPS numbers for some spots over there, and let me tell you, the snappers were plentiful.  We limited out in about 2 hours of fishing.  Giant button, blackfin, and yelloweye snappers were biting great.  Every drop down on our multi hook rigs, came up with 5-7 snappers.  When we caught about our limit, we headed for home.  The funny thing is that it took me longer to filet all the fish than it did to catch them.  It was a great day of snapper fishing. 

The following day we trolled all the way to Port Lucaya on Grand Bahama Island.  Again, I had my marlin, dolphin tuna spread out there, but never got a marlin bite.  We did manage to catch some big mahi mahi along the way.  When we came upon a couple big flocks of birds busting on the surface of the water, I put out a couple special tuna baits and got 6 or 7 nice blackfin tunas.  It was a good day with some nice fish brought in. 

On the last day, we trolled for home and guess what we caught?!?!?  A whole bunch more dolphin.  We had caught so many dolphin on the trip, we were begging for anything different.  Hey, most of the time of the year out of Fort Lauderdale, we would happy about catching one of 2 of these bigger dolphin, and we caught a ton of them.  Just goes to show you how ya can get a little spoiled with a few days of fishing in the Bahamas.  Great trip and thanks to everyone that came.