Good Action on our Drift Fishing Trips This Week
Capt. Paul Roydhouse
July 10, 2019
Fort Lauderdale - Saltwater Fishing Report
Nice mixed bag of snappers, kingfish and various bottom fish are biting great this month on our drift fishing trips. Yellowtail snappers are snapping on these trips this month. The yellowtails congregate in 40-80ft of water this month and are easily caught by anchoring and chumming. Chumming the water gets the yellowtails to come right up to the boat where you can cast a flat line out and catch them one right after the other. It can take some time to get them chummed up and biting good, but once you do, they bite like mad.
And if the snappers are biting, you're probably in a good area for tuna, kingfish, mutton snapper and grouper too. All the stuff on the reef congregate around the same depths and feed on the same food, so if you find one species biting good, the others are not far behind. Summer is always good for a variety of fish biting on the reefs. Mutton snappers for one are biting like mad. Unfortunately, so many of them are now not keeper sized. They raised the size limits so that muttons have to be pretty big before you can keep them. This is a good thing for the fishery, but it sure is hard to throw back a nice size mutton when it's only millimeters too short. Stock for next year I guess.
Groupers are also bottom fish that are biting good this month. Lots of red, black and strawberry groupers are biting on our drift fishing trips. You can catch them morning, afternoon or night and they eat just about anything (Squid is best bait for just about anything on the bottom). If you're bottom fishing and you have the chum flowing, expect at least a few groupers to be in the area chewing. They always are.
Mahi-mahi haven't been around very strong. They bite good for 2-3 days and then they disappear for 2-3 weeks. That's how the mahi bite has been lately. This week, we found a nice little school out there on the drift fishing trip. They swam right up on us while we were snapper fishing and we caught them up real quick. That's one nice thing about drift fishing, there are always a lot of lines in the water so if a school swims up on you, you can catch the lot of them. Even though the dolphin bite has been scarce, it's always good to keep a pitch bait at the ready, just in case a school swims up on you.
Good luck to everyone fishing this week. Lots of good catches lately. Snappers are biting the best and there's plenty of other fish to be caught as well. And the ocean is flat calm this time of year, making it really nice to go out fishing. The afternoon rains haven't affected us hardly at all. They just cool everything down for a while. Good luck to everyone and I'll sea you on the water.
Capt. Andy Roydhouse
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754-214-7863
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