Fort Lauderdale Fishing
Capt. Mike Johnson
February 8, 2011
Fort Lauderdale - Saltwater Fishing Report
Sharks and Sailfish Spend the Winter in Fort Lauderdale
Along with sharks, we have a couple other big toothy critters that swim our waters. Just ask Jared Brady and John and Gabe Katz from Ohio. Each caught a nice barracuda while slow trolling live bonita on the 15th of Jan. The 16th another big toothy catch was made by Carol and Don along with their good friends Carrie and Chris from Star Lake in Canada. They caught a beautiful 42 " Wahoo. They went for quality not quantity. Nice goin guys and gals. Now for some shark highlights. On the 22nd Mike the DJ from Houston, TX made the highlight reel with a 98 inch Hammerhead shark, about 250#'s we had the kites up looking for sailfish which was Mike's dreamfish but since sailfishing had been a little slow the last few days we put out a couple of sharkbaits as well. We waited and waited, and waited. I asked Mike if he wanted to try something else and he said "go big or go home" so we stuck it out. It wasn't too much longer before we got "THE BITE". The kingfish head we had on the deep rod bowed over hard as line began ripping from the reel. We cleared the other lines and went to battle. Big Mike jumped in the big chair and began slugging it out. After a good 30 or 40 minutes we got the fish. Pulled it in for a couple of pictures and let it go great job Mike.
Mike fished with us a few days later still looking for that sailfish and we timed it just right. The weather had kicked up quite a bit but the fish were snapping. We launched the kites and in ten minutes we had our first sailfish bite. After the fish stripped a bunch of line it threw the hook and we were back to square one. Another ten or fifteen minutes went by and another sailfish popped up on the right short kite bait and right before he ate it a pack of large mahi mahi swarmed the bait and inhaled before the sailfish could get it. We caught one nice mahi and missed another one. We got the baits back out and got another bite from a sailfish, this one DJ Mike caught a beautiful 84" sailfish. Baits back out and we caught another. It was time to go home but we wanted one more I ran south and popped the kites one more time, I was gonna give it an extra 10 minutes. We got the first bait in the water and there he was, we were hooked up again, sailf fishing fort Lauderdale was hot today. We ended up 3 for 4 on sailfish plus a nice mahi.
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