Fort Lauderdale, FL - Offshore
Capt. David Ide
January 28, 2002
Fort Lauderdale - Saltwater Fishing Report
The Weather and the Fishing are Great!
On Monday January 14th, we had E-NE winds, the current was going North and the water was green. We heard the Sailfish bite was decent off the steeple. We started kite fishing in 130' of water and fishing in green water is always tough. Within a half hour, Steve Johnson of Fort Lauderdale caught his first Sailfish. With not much going on with the other boats around me, I headed for the wrecks and caught a 40 lb. Amberjack.
The rest of the week was the same with a few Sails, Dolphin and a few Amberjacks the other days.
On Monday the 21st, we fished the wrecks and 12 year old Michael Fogel of Delray Beach, caught two Almaco Jacks of 20 lbs. each and a 40 lb. Amberjack.
On the 22nd we headed offshore and found a log floating in 580’ of Blue water. On our first pass we caught a 12 lb. Dolphin and a 10 lb. Wahoo. We put out a wire line and caught 8 more Wahoo on double hooked Ballyhoos with a pink sea witch. After they quit biting we backed up to the log and casted a spinning rod out with a piece of cut bait and caught a 10 lb. Triple Tail. What a great fighting fish that is.
January 23rd brought SE winds of 15 knots. The current was hard North, but the water was still green. Every year this week has been red hot for Sailfish. We were hoping for a cold front, but this day proved that you don’t always need one for the Sails to bite.
The charter boat Happy Day Today called me to say that they had a triple header Sailfish on. They were off the Steeple in 100’ of water. We ran up there and put the kite up. Within 10 minutes Colin Taylor of New York had caught his first Sailfish and released it. The other charter boats around us all had fish on. The Happy Day ended up 6 for 9 on the morning trip and other boats had 3 to 4 fish each.
On Saturday night we went Swordfishing. The seas were calm and no wind. There were boats everywhere. I counted almost 30 boats. I was hoping for one bite! On the first drift the shallow bait went off and we caught a 50 lb. Sword. We put the baits back out and the same rod went off again. After a short run we pulled the hook. I ran back to the same numbers that we started on. We put the baits out again and the deep bait went off. After 30 minutes we caught a 120 lb. Swordfish and lost another one while clearing the baits. We ended up catching 2 Swordfish out of 4 bites. We were home by 1 AM.
Bait fishing has been real tough all week. A few Blue Runners and tinkers on the ships. We have had to buy goggle eyes from the bait boats most everyday.
Catch-em-up,
Capt. Kunta
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