Summer is here and the weather is getting hot.  The action on the reef is heating up too as the big schools of bonitos and kingfish make their way down the edge of the gulfstream.  Our daily drift fishing trips have been getting some awesome catches of kingfish and bonitos lately.  When a school of bonitos swims anywhere near the boat, every line we have in the water gets bit.  It can be pretty exciting at times.  Mixed in with these bonito schools are kingfish and the occassional tuna and/or wahoo. 

Sportfishing trips have been very good lately too. On our longer trips, 6 hours or more, we’ve been trolling offshore for mahi-mahi.  June is the best month of the year for finding schools of mahi-mahi offshore along weedlines.  The dolphins have been mostly peanuts, but the numbers of them have been great.  One good school of fish can fill the box and max out your daily limit of 10 per person.  This time of year also, you have the outside chance at a blue marlin, the grand prize fish of the entire ocean.  Unfortunately, we don’t catch them very often, but this is the time of year you will see a few caught out there.  If we caught them all the time, they wouldn’t be such a prized fish.

Our half day sportfishing trips have been fishing the reef, where there has been realy good action on bonito and kingfish.  Trolling the reef can also catch you the occassional wahoo, tuna or even sailfish this time of year.  Wreck fishing on the shallow and deep wrecks has been good for barracuda, amberjack and an occassional cobia.  We’ve even been getting some big mutton snappers lately during the day trips.

The night fishing on our night anchor trips has been great for action and probably our best trip for catching the most fish overall.  On our night trips, we target snappers and the snapper fishing has been awesome.  Yellowtails are biting pretty regular.  The muttons are beginning to show up for the mutton spawn and are being caught more and more on our trips lately.  Mangroves are biting great too and have been really big ones.  All in all the night trips have been great.  Great fishing this month and it should get better and better until the end of August.  Sea you on the water. 

Daytime Drift Fishing

The fishing in early June is always good action off the South Florida coastline.  In Ft Lauderdale, we’re seeing an abundance of activity on the reefs.  Large bait schools are trying to make their way northward, but are getting beat up hard by huge schools of kingfish.  On our daytime drift fishing trips, we are finding kingfish all over the 100’ reefs.  The kingfish have been ranging in sizes from little 4 pounders, all the way up to the occasional 20 pounder.  Bonitos have begun to show themselves on the reefs this summer with the first few schools hitting us hard last Wednesday.  When the bonitos are coming through, we catch so many fish, we come home sore at night.  It’s a blast and it lasts all summer long.  Bonitos feed alongside the kingfish and sometimes with wahoo or blackfin tuna.  When the bonitos are around, the action is always fierce.

Night Anchor Fishing

The action on the day drift fishing trips has been good, but the night fishing offers a different style of fishing;  snapper anchor fishing.  Anchor fishing and chumming has been one of my favorite types of fishing since I was a kid.  The chum brings fish in from a long way away and once the chum has been working for a while, the action heats up.  We target snapper of all species; yellowtail, mangrove, lane, mutton, vermillion and any other kind of delicious red snapper down there.  Sometimes we’ll catch something out of the ordinary such as a cobia or big grouper.  I guess I enjoy night anchor fishing because whenever you get a bite, it could be literally anything.  You never know till you catch it. 

Offshore Mahi-Mahi Fishing

June is best month for offshore mahi-mahi fishing.  It is during this and next month when the ocean calms down, heats up and the big piles of sargasm weed stack up.  This is prime conditions for big schools of mahi-mahi.  Mahi-mahi are voracious eaters.  They can grow to over 20 pounds in the first year, but most of the ones we catch in the summer are 5-8 pounders.  June is a great month for finding schools of 30-50 fish congregated together.  Find a school like that and you’re in for an unforgettable fishing experience.  Try the Wednesday all day dolphin trip or a sportfishing charter for an offshore dolphin trip.

May is here and what a beautiful month.  The action in Fort Lauderdale this month has been on the reef.  Sure, there are some dolphin biting here and there offshore, but they have been few and far between.  Kingfish are biting like mad just a mile our shore, so we haven’t ventured out too much farther than that.  My dad always said to me, “The first rule of fishing is never leave fish to find fish.”  Kingfishing in on the 80′-150′ reefs has been action packed this month, and I’m looking forward to an action packed summer as well.  Our 4 hour drift fishing trips are bringing in some very nice catches of king mackerals(kingfish), and snappers.  There have been a few mahi-mahi and groupers mixed in also. 

From now until the end of September, is about the best few months for our drift fishing boat, the Catch My Drift.  The kingfish, bonito and tuna drive a major migration through our waters this season.  Snappers too, are thick in the late spring and early summer with the mutton and mangrove spawn.  There’s always a variety of fish to be caught on all our different fishing trips.

The sportfishing boats are getting their fair share of the reef action too.  The sportfishing boats, by dragging live baits around the reef, are catching some humongous kingfish.  King fish average 4-10 pounds, but can actually grow to over 50 pounds.  We don’t get the kingfish over 30 pounds very often, but it’s awesome when we do.  This week, our sportfishing boats have coming in with a few awesome catches of giant kingfish.  And of coarse, whenever you are deep sea fishing in kingfish waters, you also have good chances at sailfish, tuna and wahoo.  A few big wahoos have hit the docks this week also. 

Well, that’s the fishing report for this week.  Great fishing on all the boats.  Fishing is actually pretty easy when the fish are biting this good.  Thanks for reading my fishing report and I hope to sea you all out there fishing.  Tight lines.

April has been one exciting month for us here in Ft. Lauderdale.  Our drift fishing boat, the Catch My Drift has been pulling in a lot of big kingfish on their morning and afternoon fishing trips.  Kingfish were scarce for us this winter, but have made a strong comeback.  They are biting in 100-200′ of water, just outside the reef.  Mixed in with the kingfish has been the occassional blackfin tuna and sailfish.  There’s a lot of bait around right now, both offshore and inshore.  Bait fish start the food chain, and with them, the big predator fish show up for some easy eating.  The night fishing trips on our party boat are coming up with yellowtail, mangrove and some bigger mutton snapper.  Our night anchor fishing trips have been the best for action, but for the big fish (kingfish, tuna and grouper) the day fishing better.

Our sport fishing boat, the Big Game, has had one helluva month.  We’ve lately been catching sailfish better than in the winter months.  Kite fishing on the edge of the gulfstream has been highly productive for sailfish, along with big game sharks and mahi-mahi.  We’re smack dab in the middle of shark fishing season here in South Florida, and the big game sharks are snapping.  On our sport fishing trips, hammerheads, makos, threshers, bulls and duskys are the sharks we see most often.  This is the time of year when all the biggest fish are caught. 

The offshore dolphin fishing is phenomenal  right now.  Big, and I mean BIG, mahi-mahi are being caught trolling the weedlines that form a few miles offshore.  April is usually a good month for mahi-mahi, but May is usually even better.  Expect to see some solid dolphin fishing in the next few months.  Along with dolphin, when trolling offshore, you also have good chances of finding tuna, wahoo and sailfish.  If you’re exceptionally lucky, you may even catch a once in a lifetime blue marlin.  I look forward to April-May fishing the whole year, because you can catch just about anything and everything. 

We had one helluva sport fishing trip out of Fort Lauderdale the other day.  There have been some big fish showing up, so we were expecting just about anything that day.  As we headed out the inlet to fishing grounds, I noticed a gorgeous current edge in about 350′ of water.  There was a rather strong breeze that day, so I set out 2 of our heavy wind kites and suspended some fresh live goggle eyes from them.  There have been some gigantic sharks around, so we thought it a good idea to send a rigged bloody tuna down to the bottom.  With our baits set we sat back, kept watch and waited patiently for a big game fish to show himself. 

An hour went by and still not a bite.  The water looked just too perfect for us to not have caught anything by now.  Joey was in the cockpit and yelled up, “Let’s try something else, Cap’n.”  I shouted back, “Let’s give it a few more minutes.  He’ll jump on there.”  Not a half second past by when I saw the fish.  I screamed, “Left Long!!  There he is!!”  It was a giant mahi-mahi, a bull.   The bull ate the goggle eye and swam towards one of the others.  Off the right rigger I caught sight of another dolphin fish eating the right short bait.  “Another on the right short!”, I said.   Joey and the anglers reacted quickly and hooked into both dolphins.  The bigger dolphin looked unusually large.

We had been fighting both fish for 35 minutes when the cow came within gaffing range.  Joey reached out and struck the cow dolphin with the boat gaff.  As he pulled the fish over the gunwale of the Big Game, the fish went crazy and put on quite a scuffle in the cockpit.  A few whacks with the fish bat solved that right quick.    Our other angler was still engaged with the bull, which had taken some long runs and by now a good way from the boat.  With only one fish to contend with now, we could go after the fish with the boat a bit better. 

Backing down hard with the Big Game, we finally got into range of the big bull.  Looking down from the boat, into the water, we could tell this was a monster game fish.  The big mahi used his tall, narrow head as if it were a keel and stayed obstinately parallel and a steady distance from the boat.  The power of this fish was amazing. 

By this point, the fish was spent and so was the fisherman who was fighting the brute.  The fish came within gaff range and Joey reached out and stuck him.  We were heroes.  It was an exceptional day of fishing.  One that will not be forgot.  Thanks for reading my fish story.

-Written by Capt. Rod Roydhouse 

We’ve gone out one some incredible fishing trips this past week.  Mahi-mahi, sailfish, sharks, kingfish, barracuda, you name it and we’ve caught it.  There’s an abundance of big game fish around in South Florida waters this month.  Below is a letter written in by some of our customers last week.  They chartered us for 2 days and they caught all kinds of cool fish on their trip.  I’ll post the letter with some of the photos they sent me.  Sorry I can’t post them all, there’s not enough room.  Thanks for the kind words guys and thanks for all the photos. 

      We just returned home to Toledo Ohio and went through the pictures we got on a recent trip with Captain Adam and Rod. We had a great time on 2 day trips on the private charter. Adam had asked us to send some of the pictures we got for you to post. I have been out with Adam several times now and with Joe and Rod and want to personally thank these guys, we had a great time and these guys made it even better. We caught 12 snapper, a large rainbow runner, an Albaco, a 75 pound Amberjack, 2 sailfish, a 9′ hammer head, 7 dolphin and a bunch of other fish in just 2 days. It couldn’t have been any better. I was down in January and went out with my wife and kids, this being the first trip for my 2 kids. We caught 2 sailfish, a dolphin and a 5 foot amberjack in

5 hours. ( you have several pictures of my son Joey with his amberjack on your site). Anyway here several pictures from this most recent trip with myself and 3 friends that came down there just to fish with your crew. (the group was Tom peternel, Brian Christen, Mike Stevens and Joe Dzierwa). Thanks again and good luck, see you later in the year.

Things are heating up in Fort Lauderdale.  March is the start of the spring fishing, and the fish are already biting off the chain.  Mahi-mahi are showing up in large numbers and even coming in close to the reef.  Wahoo are around if you take some time to fish for them.  Big amberjacks and groupers are biting atop the shipwrecks off our coast.  The kingfish are showing up on the reefs with a blackfin tuna or two.  We’re having some awesome deep sea fishing out there and we still have April and May ahead of us.  It’s going to be some off the scale fishing coming up.

We’ve waited for quite a while for the mahi-mahi to start showing up again for us, and finally they have returned.  Our Wednesday All day fishing trip has been caught some good size ones this week, and even the half day drift trips on the reef have run into a few schools of dolphin this week.  The big game sportfishing boats are catching the bigger dolphins though.  Wahoo, usually caught fishing offshore for mahi-mahi, are showing up pretty good.  On yesterday’s morning sportfishing charter, we went trolling offshore for mahi-mahi.  Adam caught a few small mahi-mahi, but we threw them back because they were pretty tiny.  We see a couple boats offshore of us, sitting in one spot for a while so we trolled over toward them.  They were fishing next to a floating piece of bamboo.  It looked like they were live baiting, so we kept our trolling spread out and trolled near the board.  On every pass we hooked into and caught a nice wahoo. 

The wreck fishing has been exceptionally good for us lately as well.  Amberjacks are on the wrecks in force and the spring always brings up the big ones.  If you’ve never fought an amberjack before, a 40-50 pounder will pull your arm off (at least it will feel like it).  Our sport fishing boat, the Big Game is pulling up monster amberjacks daily on the 200-250’ shipwrecks.  Occasionally a big grouper will bite also.  This photo shows the biggest grouper we’ve caught in a while.  Very nice fish guys!  All in all, there’s a lot of variety of fish biting out there right now and some monster fish to be caught.  Sea ya on the water.

After a very slow period the last few weeks, we’re starting to catch some awesome fish out there.  I’ll focus this report mostly on the drift fishing, which has gotten incredibly better.  The kingfish are back!!  We’ve missed them, but they came back to us this week in great numbers.  The morning trip has been the best for the kingfish.  We’ve also been catching a few blackfin tunas.  There have been some cool fish around.  I will write the sportfishing report in a couple days.  You will be amazed at the fish we’ve been putting on the docks this week.  But the drift fishing has improved immensly over the past few days.

Our Wednesday All Day trip this week didn’t do much for dolphin.  They caught some kings and other reef fish, but the dolphin fishing was slow for them that day.  Thursday, the very next day on our half day fishing trip, our party boat the Catch My Drift caught a pile of dolphin. The dolphin were pouring through on the reef on Thursday and we caught about 15 of them.  The Wednesday trip last week was one day too late it seemed.  Today, the sportfishing boat caught some humongous dolphins which I’ll post pictures of when I post my next report. 

There have been kingfish, dolphin, blackfin tuna, bonito and snapper on the daily party boat fishing trips.  The fishing should continue to be good for all of March, April and May.  An honorable mention has been the wreck fishing.  This week, the groupers have been hitting particularly well for us.  On this trip, we caught a 3 big snowy groupers, a few jacks and some vermillion snappers.  A nice catch of some good eating fish.  Fishing is getting awesome.  I will start updating my fishing reports more often now that the fishing is better.  Come out fishing with us!

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SHARKS ARE HERE!  The shark train is coming through.  Chooo-chooo!  Every year, from February to June, a massive migration of hammerhead, bull, dusky and thresher sharks swim through our waters.  We get so many sharks and it lasts for so long, that we call it the shark train.  This is the best time of the year to go big game shark fishing.  Our sportfishing charter boats, the Big Game and the Out of the Blue have been catching some monster sharks this week.  Our biggest shark of the week was this 300 pound hammerhead shark that you see swimming in this photo.  The fish was a brutal fighter and the angler that caught it, got to experience the fight of a lifetime. 

We run a lot of shark fishing trips this season, but there are some other nice fish around this time of year also.  The mahi-mahi dolphin fish have started to show themselves again.  They don’t much care for cold water, so very few of them are usually caught in the winter months.  It’s warming up nicely here in Fort Lauderdale and so the dolphin fish should start biting better and better.  We’ve been seeing some nice dolphin caught on the Wednesday All Day Dolphin Fishing Trip and on some of our daily shared sportfishing charters.  It’s good to see some mahi-mahi biting again.

The wrecks are always active in the Spring.  Golden amberjacks are numerous around the South Florida shipwrecks right now.  Amberjacks are very strong fish and its not uncommon to catch one up to 50 pounds this time of year.  Also feeding on the small bait fish around the local shipwrecks are cobia, grouper and snapper.  Cobia and groupers are also big game fish and can be caught into the 50 pound range.  In the Spring months, you can literally catch anything because EVERYTHING is biting.  Wreck fishing can be very fun though because of the large game fish and all the action that happens.

The reef fishing isn’t bad either.  We just got finished with a relatively slow winter for reef fishing, but all that changes when things get sunny and warm again.  Kingfish are starting to bite good on the morning and afternoon drift fishing trips.  Trolling for kingfish has been very productive this week too.  On our morning trip today, we caught a  35 pound blackfin tuna which was the biggest fish caught of the trip.  We should see a few big schools of blackfin tuna off the Fort Lauderdale coast in the weeks to come. 

All in all, we’ve had some great fishing this month.  March, April and May are my 3 favorite months for deep sea fishing in Fort Lauderdale.  Sea you on the water. 

The weather has been COLD for us Florida folks this week.  I’m sure it is colder up in the northern states, but Floridians are not used to such cold weather.  The good thing about this cold weather is that the sailfish always bite good when there is a cold front coming through.  The cooler temperatures have brought the sailfish up and they are feeding good.  Most of the other surface feeders have slowed down a bit, but they’ll be back soon when the temperatures warm up.  But sailfish is what’s hot right now.  The Ft Lauderdale sportfishing boats are catching sailfish great this month, so it’s a great time to get out on a charter if you really want to get a sailfish.  This is the tail end of the sailfish season, so this is pretty much your last month to have a really good shot at catching one. 

Sailfish are one of those species that’s around throughout the year here in Ft Lauderdale.   The best bite on them is the winter though.  I would say that we catch over 70% of all the sailfish we catch in a year in the months of November through February.  You can catch a sailfish in the hottest months of August and September, but you have a lot better chances in the winter season.  The sailfish we’ve been catching on our sportfishing charters this year have been beauties.  Almost all of them have been 6-7 feet long and sometimes even a bit bigger.  They are by far the most fun fish to catch because of all the jumping they do when they’re on the line. 

Sailfish aren’t the only fish biting in Ft Lauderdale right now.  The wrecks have been holding some pretty nice fish too.  Big amberjacks and some nice grouper are being caught around the 200-300′ shipwrecks we have in our area.  Wreck fishing is fun, because you can literally catch just about anything and you never know what you have on the line until you get him to the boat.  Big game sharks have begun to show up as well.  We’ve started to catch a few hammerhead sharks, a few bull sharks and even a couple mako sharks in the last couple weeks.  The sharks will be migrating through our waters throughout the months of February until late May.  In recent years, the shark fishing has gotten better and better out here.  Spring fish are on their way, so get ready for some awesome action.  It’s going to be an awesome fishing season in Ft Lauderdale.  Sea ya on the water.