 A great week of fishing off Ft. Lauderdale this week. We had our summer time bonitos and kingfish biting, but also a few nice surprises as well. The kingfish were biting pretty steady on most of our trips. We’ve been catching them in about mid depth in 120’-180’ of water both drift fishing and trolling for them. A lot of 6-8 pounders and a few bigger ones in the 12-20 pound range. The bigger kings have been eating live blue runners out of the kite or live pilchards while drifting. Bonitos have been mixed in with the kings and are eating anything, they aren’t that picky. When a school of bonito comes through your spread, every line you have out there gets a fish on it. It’s pandemonium on some trips when the bonitos are everywhere. They are fun to catch though.
The guys fishing the bottom are getting good sized muttons. I’ve been seeing the party boats coming in with a few nice mutton snappers on every trip. A couple of big groupers as well, but most of them are throw backs unfortunately. The night anchor trip reports tons of muttons being caught while anchor fishing and chumming the water. Unfortunately most of those muttons have been too short as well. A few have been keepers though and they have been coming in with a nice catch of yellowtails and muttons almost every night.
On more than one trip this week, we’ve been jumped by a pack of mahi mahi. The dolphins swam up on us while we were just drifting out there and we’ve managed to catch a few big ones. One trip we got jumped by a huge bull that weighed about 40 pounds and his little pack of cows. We caught the huge bull and 2 of the 3 cows that were with him. The bull weighed about 40 pounds and the cows weighed around 20 and 25 a piece. Plus we caught some kings, snapper and bonitos that trip too. It was a great day.
The Catch My Drift has been in the boatyard getting a fresh paintjob this week, so we haven’t been able to go swordfishing last week. I heard the bite was slow, but that’s because we weren’t out there! Hehe, just kidding. We’ll be out there this Friday on our Friday night swordfish trip so I’ll let you all know what we catch then. See ya’ll later…
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