There’s a hot bite going on, trolling the edge of the gulfstream. Sailfish season has begun and its starting off with a bang. We’re getting a great early morning and late afternoon bite on the sailfish, and around that time of the day, we’re seeing a lot of free jumpers too. Sailfish season begins now and lasts till around late February, when the bite finally tapers off. We should have an excellent sailfish season this year. We’re seeing a hot bite on the edge for wahoo too, some of them monsters. On our last Wednesday All Day Dolphin Fishing Trip we caught 3 wahoos all at the same time… a triple header. Wahoo love fast moving baits, so we’ve been trolling some high speed planers down deep with a skirted double hooked ballyhoo. Wahooooo! I love wahoo.
The autumn mullet run is beginning now too. I saw the first few schools coming down the beach this week. Every year around this time, huge schools of mullet will migrate northward down our coast, just a few hundred yards off the beach. You can see them quite clearly as a large black cloud moving through the water. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to get to the beach early, before the life guards show up. We’d cast out a weighted treble hook and snag a mullet. Then we’d use that mullet as bait and cast it out in front of the schools. It was a blast, we’d catch tarpon, small sharks, snook, and mutton snapper. Of course, when the Ft Lauderdale life guards show up, they kick you out so you only get to fish for like an hour just after dawn. Well, the mullet are beginning their migration down the coastline, and this will last for about 6 weeks. Our canals up and down the Ft Lauderdale intracoastal waterway will fill up with mullet too… easy fresh live bait for us!
There’s always some big game fish following the mullet schools too. While most of the mullet schools with stay in shallow waters, where it is safer, some mullet schools will inevitably wind up offshore. Finding and fishing around an offshore school of mullet is exciting. There could be a school of mahi-mahi swimming with them, picking them off one at a time. There could be sailfish there, tuna underneath, wahoo around, sharks circling or even marlin lurking. You never know what you may catch around one of these ‘pots of gold’ we find offshore fishing in Ft Lauderdale.
Before I finish, I want to mention that wreck fishing / bottom fishing has also been excellent lately. Amberjacks, the primary big game residents of the deepwater shipwrecks are biting good still. A few cobia, who also frequently migrate along with the mullets are beginning to bite on the wrecks also. And Warsaw groupers, the largest of the groupers that we catch regularly fishing in Ft Lauderdale are also biting great. We’ve caught a lot of big Warsaw groupers this month, most of them 50-60 pounders. Let me tell you, a 60 lb. stud grouper can put up a brutal fight. It’s been some great fishing lately and we’re just getting into the fall fishing season with the mullet run. Sea ya on the water.
-Capt. Andy Roydhouse
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