Action on the reefs has been hot with lots of bonitos and kingfish biting.  Bonitos are still biting in full force, but we should be nearing the end of their migration, so we may only have another couple weeks of good bonito fishing.  Kingfish on the other hand, generally bite well for us in late August and September.  The kings have been biting alongside the bonitos, same depths of water and the same baits.  Drift fishing has been very productive lately.  Most of our trips have been action packed with some really nice fish coming over the side.  Kingfish have been averaging in the 4-10 pound range, with a few bigger kingfish here and there.  Our day time drift fishing trips are also catching some nice yellowtail snappers.  Yellowtail snappers have been biting very well for us during the day drift trips as well as our night anchor trips.  Yellowtails have been nice sized ones too, most of them being at least 2 pounds.

The drift fishing has been great, but the sportfishing has been where we’re catching the really big game fish.  This summer has been excellent season for us for catching hammerhead sharks, sailfish, smoker big wahoo, and big jacks and cudas.  Kite fishing on the days when we have enough wind has been effective for the summer sailfish bite.  Winter has traditionally always been the best time of year to catch sailfish, but sailfish are one of those species where there’s always a few of them around.  Sharks too, are year round feeders off the Fort Lauderdale coast, and although spring is high season for sharks, there’s always a few big game sharks swimming off our coast.   

Wrecks have been holding some really big fish lately too.  Big amberjacks are hanging thick on deep shipwrecks.  Occasionally, you’ll get really lucky with a black, gag or warsaw grouper.  On the shallow wrecks, we’ve been pulling live baits around using downriggers and catching some giant barracuda.  Also around the shallow wrecks this time of year are mutton snappers and the odd-ball cobia.  Wreck hopping, a tactic we use of dropping a quick bait on a wreck, waiting a few minutes and moving to another wreck, has been a great fishing technique for catching some quick monster sized fish.  The great thing about fishing this way, is that you either get the bite right away, or you’re moving to another spot where the fish are hopefully a bit more aggressive.  You usually don’t have to dangle a live bonito or blue runner for very long around a wreck to get a bite. 

Dolphin fishing offshore has continued to be very hit or miss.  We’ve gone out on a few dolphin trips lately, with varying results.  A couple trips were very successful for us, when we found a school of schoolie dolphins, or found a big board or log floating, which was loaded with fish.  A couple other trips offshore were completely dead with literally nothing biting out there.  The dolphins have definitely NOT made their summer run down the coast this year yet, but it should be soon.  If I remember correctly, last summer Florida fishing was fairly slow on dolphin until late August as well, and they stayed biting long into September for us.  Hopefully, we’ll get a repeat of that this year and they’ll start biting red hot in the next few days.  Good luck to everyone going fishing this week.  There are some nice fish to be caught out there, you just have to try hard for them.  Sea ya on the water. 

The deep sea fishing was great off Ft Lauderdale this week.  The drift boats have been catching kingfish after kingfish after kingfish.  There have been a lot of kingfish on the reef.  Action has been good on our morning and afternoon drift fishing trips.  The night tirp has been great for snappers of all species.  Yellowtails, mangorves and mutton snappers are what we are targeting on our night anchor trips, but we catch a million other types of bottom fish too.  Pretty much fishing in general has been great. Sportfishing trips are coming in with some really awesome big game fish this week.  Big kingfish, bull dolphin, wahoo, and a few tuna.  There have been some humongous sharks and a few sailfish caught this week as well.  Great fishing in Fort Lauderdale this week.

Our morning and afternoon drift fishing trips have been going out all week, despite the bad weather.  It’s been rainy, but otherwise pretty calm out on the ocean.  The fish are already wet, they don’t care if it’s raining!  We’ve been drifting in about 120′ of water and the kingfish action has been constant.  A few kingfish here and there and then we’ll get slammed by a big school of kingfish and then everyone is hooked up.  Those fishermen fishing with bottom fishing rigs have been catching a couple muttons and a few yellowtail.  But I always reccomend fishing with a kingfish rig on the daytime trip.  Kingfish are such fun to catch because take out fast runs on the drag and they are so much bigger than snappers.  If you want to snapper fish, go out on the night trip.  We anchor and target snappers so you will catch a lot more of them than drifting the reef.

The night fishing trips are coming in with some really good catches of snappers.  Yellowtails are biting pretty good, there are soom mangroves mixed in and the muttons are starting to bite good out there too.  Not every night is a mutton night, but we’ve had some good mutton snapper catches this week.  Some time in the next month, we’re going to have the big mutton spawn and we’re going to have some off the scale nights of mutton snapper fishing.  The mutton snappers alway spawn around the June full moon here in Fort Lauderdale, and in the past few years during the mutton spawn, we’ve limited out on mutton snappers.  And all big ones too.   

Sportfishing has been absolutely great.  I love fishing in May and June.  There’s so much life out there on the reefs.  Baitfish are all over the place.  Kingfish are piling through the baitfish schools and gorging themselves.  There are tunas, bonitos and mahi-mahi coming in on the reef.  Wahoo too are starting to show up good out there.  There’s a lot of action.  Kitefishing on the days with some wind is great too.  Monster sharks are migrating this month.  We’ve been getting some hammerhead sharks, thresher sharks, mako sharks and a couple bull sharks.  Kite fishing has also been great for sailfish.  We’ve had a hellatious spring fishing season.  Some very large bull dolphin coming in close to only 200′ of water.  That’s stuff you only see this time of year deep sea fishing off Fort Lauderdale.  All in all, exceptional fishing this month.  Tight lines everyone.  Sea ya on the water.  

Sorry I haven’t written a post in so long.  One of my engines broke down on me, so I’ve been working hard to get it fixed up right.  We got a new engine now, so everything should be great.  Anyway, today’s post is about a fishing trip for a couple young boys who went on one of our night anchor trips.  Captain Billy was at the helm and Josh Jr. and Jaime were in the cockpit with the fishermen.

It was a great night out there with a lot of action.  This trip was one of our 7:30 PM- 11:30 PM trips we run on the Catch My Drift.  It was our anchor fishing trip where we go out to the reef and anchor fish for yellowtail snappers and other reef fish.  It was a pretty nice night, only lightly choppy.  We anchored upcurrent of one of our shallow water spots in about 80′ of water.  The mates started chumming the water to get the fish hungry.  It worked.  Not soon after we stopped to fish did we start getting some good action. 

Lots of grunts, goggle eyes, squirrel fish, trigger fish and other throw back fish were caught.  We got into the blue runners later on in the night.  They were big ones too, 4-5 pounders.  Blue runners are normally not that large and they were biting crazy.  We probably released as many as we brought in.    The snappers were biting really good too.  We got into the vermillion snappers and caught a ton of them.  Vermillion snappers don’t normally bite this close to shore, but they did on this night.  Vermillion snappers are normally deeper water snappers.  We typically catch them in depth’s of 200-300′ of water.  Thats why catching them this night in only 80′ of water was so interesting. 

It was a good night of fishing and lots of action.  Sal Venuto Jr. and his friend Jonathan Cefalo, both boys age 12, were visiting from New York City and went fishing on our night trip aboard the Catch My Drift.  The boys sent me this nice email and all these photos.  Thanks for fishing with us guys and we look forward to having you back soon. 

The all day dolphin trip this week was just plain awesome.  We caught so many fish.  The fishermen were lucky enough to have Capt. Paul run the charter this week and wow did they get into the fish good today.  The ocean was gorgeous and it was actually cool out.  The summer heat is gone and the temperatures are a beautiful 75 degrees out this week.  The fish are migrating through Fort Lauderdale now too.  Baitfish are all over the reefs.  Mullet, flying fish, ballyhoo, sardines and threadfin herring are just a few of the different types of small fish we saw getting chased out of the water by some of the big game fish. 

We started out on the reefs because the past few days the dolphin have been in close.  We were only in about 100′-200′ of water.  Well, right away we started catching fish.  First school of dolphin we hit was underneath a big frigate bird.  Capt. Paul spotted the bird circling low to the water and trolled over close to it.  Frigate birds usually follow big game fish and wait for them to chase the small flying fish and stuff out of the water.  Thats when they swoop down and grab them up.  Whenever you see a frigate bird working tight circles low to the water, it usually means there is a big fish near.  Well, that theory panned out for us today because as soon as we got close with the boat we were hooked up with 2 big dolphins.

They ended up being the 2 biggest dolphins of the day.  One of them, the bull, probably weighed around 22 pounds and his cow probably weighed about 15.  The frigate bird moved off, so we put the baits back out and kept trolling.  It wasn’t long before we found some more birds working.  Again, as soon as we trolled close to the school we got hooked up.  We probably hit 5 or 6 schools that day and every school had at least a few fish in it.  I think we came in with about 20 dolphins.  Well, after the dolphins slowed down and quit hitting, we decided to go to the deep spots and try our luck at some bottom fishing.

Well the deep spots were working just as good as the dolphin were biting earlier.  The second we hit the bottom we were getting bites.  Snappers, snappers and more snappers.  We probably caught over 50 vermillion snappers today.  Well, by that time we had a full day of fishing done, so we headed in.  It took us about 2 and a half hours to filet all the fish we caught today.  Fileting the fish was a lot of work, but who cares when the fish are biting this good.  The last photo here is what the half day boat caught, and they did pretty good too.  The Fort Lauderdale deep sea fishing is awesome guys, so let’s get out there and do some fishing!

We are renting our slips at the marina on Las Olas Blvd and A1A, right next to the 7-11 store and only a 5 minute walk from the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show for the week of October 25-29.  This is the perfect spot to rent if you have multiple boats to display or possibly a booth in the show.  You can keep your boats at our slips and drive or walk your customers over to our slips to take them on a sea trial.  You can take the boats out and run your customers on a sea trial or bring them over and show them the boats.  Much, much cheaper than actually renting a slip at the boat show.  We have several slips available and its going to be first come, first serve for dockage.  If you are interested in a slip to rent for the International Boat show of Fort Lauderdale, call me at (754)214-7863 to discuss options at our dock and marina.  We are located on the S.W. corner of Las Olas Blvd  and A1A southbound, only 1 block away from the boat show itself.  Call for information or to view our dock slips.  Thanks,
Capt. Andy Roydhouse

On a Sidenote:  Fort Lauderdale Boat Show has asked us to be the shuttle boat for the boat show this year again, and we’ve accepted.  We’re going to be shuttling everyone from the Bahia Mar section of the boat show to the Fort Lauderdale Convention center and then to Pier 66 Hyatt and then back again- a continuous loop around the Fort Lauderdale intracoastal waterway.  Anyway, I’m looking for a sponser to put some banners up on the top rails of the Catch My Drift while we’re shuttling everyone around.  It’ll be great exposure, and seen by a totally marine related audience.  Last year, we transported around 5,000-6,000 people back and forth from the segments of the Boat Show, and we were seen by many more thousands more, probably tens of thousands of people.  If your interested in putting large display banners on the Catch My Drift during the boat show for some great advertising, call me at (754)214-7863 and I’ll give you all the info.  Thanks, and it should be a great show this year! 

We’re back in the water and taking trips again, but this was us in the boatyard this week.  It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it.  We fixed a cutlass bearing that had given us a vibration in the starboard side of the boat.  We also straightened our shaft and took a few dings out of propeller.  It needed to be fixed and I’m glad we did it.  The transom is newly painted and looking beautiful.  We put new lettering on the back of the boat, compliments to our friends at Signs By Tommorrow.  If you need lettering done or a sign made, these guys are highly reccomended from us.  They do great work and great prices on their work- And it’s fast!  We also changed over our transducer which is the thing on the bottom of the boat that sends the signal to the bottom for our color fish finders.  Brand new and working better than ever, it gives us a crystal clear image of the ocean bottom, the fish below the boat and tells us the temperature of the water we’re fishing in.  Well, our was working sub-par before but now its working great and its all fixed.  Hopefully it will help us find the fish even more successfully now adays.  Anyway guys, good luck fishing with us out there, the boat is 100% and ready to catch some fish!

Hey guys, just trying to get the word out about this blog, so if you like reading it and can link to it, then Thanks a bunch.  This is a link to my Technorati blog page, just so I can get searched by their search spiders.  Also, I’d realy love it if anyone can link to my homepage http://www.fishheadquarters.com so I get some traffic for my fishing boat.  We’re located in Fort Lauderdale Florida and we go fishing every single day.  I try to keep my site as current as possible and I update my fishing report almost every day that we go fishing and post what we catch.  Send me a link if you can, it would really help me out a bunch.  Thanks everybody.

Also my blog is linked here:

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/sports/fishing

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.