Nice swordfish caught on our daytime swordfishing trip.

We had a great swordfishing trip the other day here at Fishing Headquarters, I just had to write a report about it.  We took out Kaylee and her dad Michael out for a daytime swordfishing charter.  Kaylee had fished with us a few weeks earlier and caught her first swordfish, but she wanted to take her dad out in hopes of catching one with him.  So we picked a nice weather day and booked a daytime swordfish charter.  We like to get out early on a daytime swordfishing trip this time of year because it gets dark early.  We like to troll on the way out and the way in on a daytime trip, since we are traveling right through prime mahi-mahi territory and the trolling is good in the daylight hours.  So we left the dock at 7am and as soon as we hit 100ft of water, we threw out the mahi-mahi lures.  We always fish a couple baits that a big marlin would pile on, just in case we drive over one of these elusive gamefish.  You never know what’s going to happen on these deep sea fishing trips.  On the way out, we hit a few skipjack tunas and we got a small mahi.  Not much to speak of, but you can’t catch them without putting in the time.

Kaylee and her dad Michael with a big swordfish just boated.

So we get out the grounds and we start doing our drops.  First drop, fish on almost instantly, but we pull the hooks after the first minute.  Second drop, no bites.  Third drop was the charm.  We hooked into a nice one.  By the way it was fighting, we knew it was a keeper.  We loaded the harpoon and waited for the fish to get into range as we reeled him up.  Soon as the fish got into harpooning distance, we launched the harpoon.  Mick, the harpooner, hit him on the first throw… a deep shot to the sweet spot just below his dorsal fin.  We got the fish close enough for a gaff shot and Michael (the angler) got the first gaff stuck perfectly in the gills.  Kaylee readied the second gaff and once we stuck the second gaff in, we had him.  There was no escaping for this magnificent swordfish. We yoked him over the gunnel and everyone screamed with exuberance.   There’s no thrill quite like getting a big swordfish into the boat.

The day was late and instead of trying for another bite, we decided to end the day on a high note.  We pulled in our lines and ran the boat home to get our much deserved photo shoot at the dock.  It was a helluva day at sea and it was a lot of fun.  If you want to see the awesome video of the fish right next to the boat, check out the awesome video we posted on our Youtube channel.  We got some good footage of this one.  And I am getting more and more video of our fishing trips these days, so please give us a subscribe on our Fishing Headquarters Youtube channel so that we can grow it.  The more subscriptions I have, the more fishing videos I will post.  Thank you to everyone who fished with us.  I’ll sea ya on the water.

Capt. Andy Roydhouse
www.FishHeadquarters.com
754-214-7863

Nice mixed bag of fish caught on a half day sportfishing charter

The reef action lights up this month with lots of bonitos, kingfish, barracuda and blackfin tunas biting.  We’re catching them trolling, the best technique of sportfishing during the summer months.  Trolling is a technique of dragging lures and rigged baits, up and down the reefs and along the edge of the Gulfstream to try to catch whatever we come across.  Its the best technique in the summer months because the fish are all scattered over the reefs and moving around, so it takes some traveling and looking around for them to find ’em.   Action in the summer is great.  While you are trolling, you will periodically hit little flurries of action on bonitos, kingfish, blackfin tunas.  Sometimes a big barracuda, wahoo or even sailfish jumps on the line.  You never know what you might catch when you are trolling.

Nice blackfin tuna just gaffed and brought into the boat on our deep sea fishing charter.

Drift fishing is awesome in the summers months.  On our day trips, we’re drifting over the reefs so you can bottom fish with a chicken rig or fish for muttons with a longer leader.  On the day trips you can also float a kingfish line out there in hopes of a big kingfish bite.  You never know what you’ll catch drift fishing in the summertime.  June is a month for mutton snappers, big mangroves, kingfish and red groupers.  Night fishing is just as good.  Snappers are biting really good.  June is the mangrove snapper spawn.  They bite really good at night, sometime off-the-scale-good.  Mangroves usually have a few nights in the summer when they snap!  They do their annual spawning along the reefs, and then throw caution to the wind and eat everything they come across.  It’s a great snapper fishing event and we have some epic snapper catches this month on our night anchor fishing trips.

Nice mutton snapper caught on our deep sea drift fishing trip by this fisher gal.

Wreck fishing is quite good in the early part of the summer.  The amberjacks from the Spring months were late this year and are still biting strong on most of the wrecks over 200ft of water.  Almaco jacks too are biting very good.  Groupers are a bit more elusive but they are there if you fish for them.  I like to fish a bit deeper for grouper 300+ feet of water for the snowy groupers.  We’re catching them on some of the deep wrecks and on an all day private charter, we can load up on the snowys going from wreck to wreck until we find them biting.  Vermillion snappers are biting too, but with all the action on the reefs, we haven’t been fishing for them much.

Nice catch of bottom fish on this deep dropping sportfishing charter out of Fort Lauderdale

Offshore fishing in Fort Lauderdale is more hit or miss.  Outside of 350ft of water, the continental shelf starts to really slope off.  It gets deep very quickly.  2 miles offshore, you are in over 600 feet of water.  Out there in these depths, there are only 2 main targets:  mahi-mahi dolphin and swordfish.  Both require really long trips to target because of the time requirement.  For dolphin, you need to cover some ground out there, the more nautical miles the better.  Every mile of territory you troll over increases your chances of finding dolphin.  Some days you find them in the first 15 minutes.  Much more often, it will be hours and hours before you find your first fish.  The good thing about dolphin is that they are gregarious.  If you find one, you are likely to find a whole school of them out there, sometimes enough to load your entire fish box in shot.  My dad always described dolphin fishing as, “hours and hours of boredom, interrupted by a moment of panic”.  It is really exciting when you do find the dolphin out there and your effort that you did to find them pays off.

Great catch of mahi-mahi on our sportfishing charter on Father’s Day weekend.

Swordfish requires it’s own trip.  You have to go even further offshore, about 15 miles offshore to get to swordfishing territory.  There are 2 ways to fish swordfish.  You can daytime deep drop for them or you can night drift for them.  Night drift is nice because you can use hand crank rods and put 4-5 lines out as you are fishing near the surface.  Daytime deep dropping only allows you to fish one line at a time and it must be an electric reel because of the extreme depths out there.  Check out our YouTube channel (and subscribe!) to see the cool swordfish video I just posted.  Swordfish are truly epic fish, both a world class trophy gamefish and a great eating fish as well.  And they get to be very large.  If you are interested in a swordfish charter, the summer months are excellent for swordfishing.

It should continue to be some great fishing this month for both our drift fishing and our sportfishing charters.  There’s lots of action to be had, you just have to go out and wet a line.  Good luck to everyone fishing with us.  I’ll sea ya on the water.

Capt. Andy Roydhouse
www.FishHeadquarters.com
754-214-7863

Nice pile of fish in the fish box during our Ft Lauderdale drift fishing trip.

Nice tuna caught on our sportfishing charter out of Fort Lauderdale.

A nice tuna and a couple kingfish caught on our sportfishing charter.

Nice mutton snapper caught by this fisher kid on a drift fishing trip out of Fort Lauderdale.

Nice kingfish caught drift fishing on the Ft Lauderdale reef.

The fishing in Fort Lauderdale has been excellent this week.  Lots of kingfish and bonitos are still biting on the reefs.  Action on the wrecks has been consistent with a good amount of snappers and sometimes a grouper.  Offshore action has been spotty.  There are some dolphin out but you have to find them which require a lot of trolling miles.  There’s been much better and more consistent action trolling the reefs and edge of the Gulfstream.  Sailfish starting biting early last week and wow!!!  what a week of sailfishing.  This is just the beginning of sailfish season and it looks like this year will be a tremendous year for them.  We catch different varieties of fish on our different trips, so this is a breakdown of what we are catching on the various deep sea fishing trips that we run:

Nice mutton snapper caught by this angler on our deep sea fishing trip

Drift Fishing Trips  8:30am & 1:30pm
Our drift fishing trips are doing well catching kingfish, bonitos and snappers.  Bonitos seem to be hanging in longer this year than in years past.  They are usually long gone by now, but there are still big numbers of bonitos on the reefs.  Kingfish are mixed in with them. We’re catching the kingfish by either flat line fishing a ballyhoo/sardine or by jigging a whip jig off the bow of the boat.  These techniques are also the best way to catch bonito and blackfin tuna.  Snappers fishing is also going good.  We’re getting some really big mutton snappers here and there on the afternoon trips.  Decent numbers of yellowtail snappers are biting as well as the full array of grunts, porgies, triggers, jacks and other good eating bottom fish.

Nice catch of bonitos and kingfish on our deep sea fishing charter.

Night Anchor Trips 7:30pm
Night anchor trips are catching the highest numbers of fish out of the 3 trips aboard our party fishing boat.  Our night anchor trip concentrates on fishing for snappers on the bottom.  Lots of yellowtails are biting at night.  Mangrove snappers are biting pretty good too.  Usually on the full moon of September, the mangroves will spawn and bite extra good.  Tomorrow night is the full moon, so we’ll see.  A select few muttons are also biting and they’ve been big!  The muttons we’re catching this week have averaged 6-12 pounds, which is a bit larger than our average muttons usually are.  Sharks are also biting on some nights on our anchor trip.  We catch a lot of Atlantic sharpnose sharks, Cuban night sharks, blacktips and nurse.  These sharks aren’t the monster gamesharks that we catch on our sportfishing charters, but rather 3-4 ft in length and perfect for a good fight on 30 pound test.  Our night anchor trips are catching the most fish by numbers of any of our daily $40 trips.

Nice mutton snapper caught night anchor fishing aboard the Catch My Drift.

Sportfishing Shared and Private Charters
Our sportfishing charters are our best all around trip and they are coming in with the most impressive catches lately.  Trolling the reefs is working excellent for kingfish, blackfin tuna, bonito, barracuda and sometimes even a wahoo.  The action on the troll has made it difficult for us to switch over and do anything different.  First rule of fishing is never to leave fish to find fish.  But once we’ve caught our limit of kingfish, we often switch over just for the heck of it to try some live baiting.  This past week, sailfishing has been off-the-scale!  September is the beginning of sailfish season here in Ft Lauderdale.  This is the time of year all the big game fishermen come down to try their luck at catching the most sought after gamefish in the ocean… Sailfish.  This sailfish season started off this past week with a bang.  We had 3 days when the sailfish were jumping in the boat.  One day we caught 6, one day 8 and 4 the next.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  It tailed off a bit over the past couple days but that’s how sailfishing is… it runs in spurts.  We get a huge influx of sailfish for a couple days and they bite like crazy, and then they disappear for a few days.  We’re only a few days into sailfish season but this sailfish season looks like it is going to be epic!

Nice sailfish caught by this fisher gal on our sportfishing charter in Ft Lauderdale.

All Day Shared Sportfishing Charters
Our All Day trip is just like our regular shared sportfishing charters except that we stay out and fish for a full 8 hour day.  We catch the same stuff, just more!  One great thing about the all day trip is that with so much fishing time available to us, we can try a few different things on the trip to catch more of a variety.  It also gives us the available time to try our luck offshore if we hear there are any mahi-mahi dolphin biting.  We also have been doing some deep dropping on our 8 hour trips and catching some cool deepwater fish such as grey tilefish, golden tilefish, barrelfish, scorpion groupers and more.  With 8 hours, we have time to catch a bunch of fish trolling the reef, switch up and try for a sailfish by live baiting with the kites and hit the wrecks for some deep bottom fish.  More fishing = better.

Nice catch of groupers, jacks and snappers on an All Day fishing trip.

Tarpon Fishing Trips
Our inshore trips have picked up a few nice tarpon this week.  We’re fishing the protected waters around the bridges and docks that line the Intracoastal Waterway.  Right now, tarpon and jack crevale are biting pretty good, along with an oddball barracuda or snook.  Tarpon can be caught day or night, but the bite is usually best for them on our night runs.  Sharks are sometimes caught on this trip at night too.  With the mullet run beginning over the next few weeks, we will have a serious influx of tarpon into our waters.  Tarpon, jack crevale, snook, barracuda, sharks and permit follow the mullet run down the coast.  This is the best time of year to go out with some light tackle and fish for these shallow water gamefish.

General Fishing
The fishing is good in September.  Temperatures will finally start to cool down towards the end of the month, so this is a transition month between the Summer and Fall fishing seasons.  With the mullet run coming down the coastline and sailfish season beginning, we’re catching some of our biggest fish of the year this month.  No matter which trip you choose, the potential is there for great catches.  Good luck to everyone fishing with us this week.  I’ll sea ya on the water,

Capt. Andy Roydhouse
www.FishHeadquarters.com
754-214-7863

Nice catch of dolphin and wahoo on the troll, off Ft Lauderdale beach.

Monster swordfish caught on a daytime swordfishing charter in Fort Lauderdale with Fishing Headquarters.

There are some monster fish biting off the Fort Lauderdale coast this week.  Sailfish and sharks have been active, lots of action on the reef and there are some pretty large fish biting around the shipwrecks.  That’s not all though.  Today we had a daytime swordfishing charter and ended up catching an estimated 500 pound swordfish, one of the biggest we’ve ever caught off our dock.  It was an incredibly exciting and equally exhausting catch.  Fishing trips like this don’t happen every day.

Hauling the monster swordfish into the boat.

We had a swordfishing trip today, a daytime trip, which meant fishing with electric reels down on the bottom out in 1500 ft of water.  Up until a few years ago, we would only go swordfishing at night.  Swordfish are nocturnal feeders.  During the day, they stay down on the bottom at average depths of 1500ft deep.  At night, swordfish rise to within a few hundred feet of the surface to actively feed and look for food.  It only made sense to us to only go out to fish for them at night.  We never fished for them during the day because we didn’t think they would bite. In the past few years, we’ve found out how wrong we were.  Swordfish feed during the daytime too, they just stay down deep in the cooler waters during the daylight hours.

Capt. Rod and Mick with their monster catch!

On our daytime swordfishing charters, we usually troll out to the fishing grounds which are about 20 miles offshore.  This is through prime mahi-mahi territory.  Mahi-mahi are actually more of a high-percentage catch for us on swordfishing charters than swordfish are.  On the troll offshore, you can hit mahi-mahi, blackfin tuna, barracuda, wahoo and even the rare and elusive blue marlin.  Today though, we didn’t get a single bite on the way out to swordfishing grounds.

Swordfish being pulled up onto the dock

We made 4 drops before we finally hooked the fish.  Each drop is pretty time consuming.  At those depths, it takes 10-15 minutes just to drop your bait all the way to the bottom.  With the Gulfstream current, its hard to keep the bait on the bottom without letting it drift up higher.  The scope of the line and the current are constantly pulling it.  Anyway, on a single swordfish drop, you get about 15-20 minutes of bottom time with the bait in the zone.  After that, it has drifted up too high so we reel it in and start again.  It takes 15-20 minutes for the electric reel to wind in all that line, without a fish on it.

Big swordfish on the dock after a daytime swordfishing charter.

On the 4th drop, we finally got a hookup and it was BIG.  The fish smoked drag off the reef for the longest time.  We must have had almost a mile of line off the reel.  We slowly gained it back in, inch by inch.  After two hours, we finally got sight of the fish and could see how big it was.  The last hundred feet of line took the longest and the fish appeared bigger and bigger and we brought him up closer to the surface.  When we had the fish about 20 feet away, Mick, the first mate on the trip, threw the harpoon which impaled the fish through it’s shoulder.  The fish was caught!

Hauling the fish into the boat was more than a small task.  It took everyone aboard to get this fish into the boat.  High fives all around!  There was no beating the catch we just got so we throttled up and ran the 20 miles back to Fort Lauderdale to take pictures with the fish.  We used a block and tackle to lift the fish onto the dock.  We took pictures with the fish over the course of the next hour and half.  After the photos were done, we cut the fish up and gave the meat away to friends and customers, feeding over a hundred different people.  Catches of swordfish this size don’t happen often.

The big fish are biting off the coast of Fort Lauderdale.  Swordfish, sharks, sailfish, marlin, barracuda and amberjacks are all big game fish that are in season now and lurking off our coast.  Let’s go fishing.

Successful daytime swordfishing trip in Fort Lauderdale with Fishing Headquarters

We went out on a daytime swordfishing trip today and had a great trip.  We started off trolling lures offshore in hopes of a marlin, sailfish or whatever else would bite.  We caught a tuna and a couple small-medium sized dolphin on the way out to fishing grounds.  Once we got out to swordfish territory, we set up our electric reels and did our first drop.  We use electric reels for daytime swordfishing because you need to drop the bait so deep to get it to where the swordfish are, 1100-1500ft down.  We are one of the only boats that has an electric reel which also has a hand crank, so you can use the electric reel function to get the bait back when you don’t get a bite or hand fight the fish if you hook up to one.

Swordfish laying on the deck of the boat, just after being caught.

BAMMO, as soon as the bait hit the bottom, we hooked up.  We must’ve dropped the bait directly on his head.  The angler got into the chair and we fought the fish all the way to the surface.  It wasn’t the biggest swordfish in the world, but it was a nice keeper size one, probably a 75 pounder.  We gaffed the fish and threw him in the boat.  Any swordfishing trip where you successfully capture a swordfish is a good trip.  Well, there’s only one thing better than a swordfish in the boat and that’s to have 2 swordfish in the boat!  We dropped again a few more times but never got another hit on a swordfish.  Time was running down, so we put our lures back out and began trolling home.

A nice swordfish and a rack of dolphin at the dock at the end of the day.

There were some nice weedlines formed offshore, so we trolled along them for a while.  We hit a couple more good size dolphin trolling and then finally hit our really big bull dolphin making the day and putting icing on the cake.  The biggest dolphin was over 25 pounds and was a solid, really nice bull.  The dolphin fishing offshore this time of year is phenomenal and if you’re out there with enough time to try it, there are some swordfish biting too.  You can catch anything this time of year when fishing offshore of Fort Lauderdale.  This is one of the best months of the year to come out on a fishing trip.  Good luck to everyone fishing this week.  I’ll sea ya on the water.