 The beginning of sailfish season is here. Although we can catch sailfish at any time during the year, the “official” season begins in November. The past few weeks we have caught a few sailfish, but after a week of extremely windy weather and our first true cold front anticipated this weekend, I am sure we are going to see more sailfish and see them more consistently.
That’s great news because I have also finished getting the boat and tackle ready for the season. Biscayne Rods refinished every single one of my rods and they look awesome. Eddie from Biscayne Rod and I also come up with new swordfish rods. They are a bit stiffer for the bigger fish we are seeing and feature the new WT roller guides including the new titanium tips. These rods are definitely top notch. We also built some new rods for daytime swordfishing. Now that the tackle is squared away, I put the new 300 Mercury Verados on the boat. Besides having the reliability of new motors, I gained speed and fuel efficiency as well. Close to 100 hours after less than a month of use and these motors have been nothing but flawless. I also took the boat to SeaVee for a few days, and they took care of all the chips (from fish, sinkers, and sea anchor shackle). The boat is now looking like brand new.
Since my last report, we have been fishing quite a bit. I fished close to 20 trips.
These trips were pretty equally divided into daytime or nighttime sword trips and daytime fishing on the edge. Fishing on the edge was pretty good most days. We did fish one day in pouring rain all day and the fishing was extremely slow. For the most part, we have been catching mahis on the deep edge which has been anywhere from 200 out to 500 feet of water. We have also caught some kings inside that edge and our sailfish have been caught either on the blue side of the edge or just inside of it. We did have two days that we caught threes sails each day, but the remainder of the full day trips, it has been one or two sailfish per day. As I mentioned earlier, we are just getting into the season and those numbers are sure to increase. So far I think it is going to be a good season as we have already seen a large amount of bait in Miami and that is a good sign for sure!
The swordfishing has been excellent as well. We have caught swordfish on all our trips but one. This includes both our day trips as well as our night trips. The trip that we didn’t catch one, we did have plenty of shots, but unfortunately our hook up ratio wasn’t good at all. The size of our swords has also been very good, including 3 real nice fish. If you want more info on swordfishing, please shoot me an e-mail and I’ll fill you in on the details.
Our season is staring to fill in nicely. I still have plenty of dates open for sailfish season, but January and February are starting to fill up. Now that sailfish season is upon us, which means that it is tournament season as well. I am booked for a few tournaments, but still have some tournaments open. If you would like to put together a tournament team or simply want to participate in a sailfish tournament, please give me a call and hopefully we can get you set up. Tournaments are always a lot of fun!
Tight Lines,
Capt. Dean Panos |
