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Fort Lauderdale, FL
Capt. Paul Roydhouse
August 2, 2007
Fort Lauderdale - Saltwater Fishing Report
Fort Lauderdale Drift Fishing and Sportfishing
The Fort Lauderdale drift fishing boats have been catching all kinds of great stuff. We’ve been catching king fish, tuna, wahoo, snapper, cobia and barracuda. Lately the fishing has been so good, its hard to keep our hooks baited. Our morning and afternoon trips have been catching literally A TON of bonitos. There are so many bonitos swimming around the area of Ft. Lauderdale right now, the other fish hardly have a chance to bite. Lately our fishing trips kinda go like this… We head out to the third reef off Fort Lauderdale, about a mile offshore. We find a spot where the water is blue and looks “fishy”. Maybe we see a current edge or a weedline, or maybe a school of baitfish being chased out of the water by some bigger fish. Whatever we find, we set the boat up current of it and shut down the engines. The Captain will tell everybody, “ok lines in. Drop ‘em down about 40 arm lengths”. Everyone drops their bait over the edge of the boat and puts it down the desired depth. Usually it doesn’t take more than a few minutes before we hear somebody yell, “fish on”. Then the fun starts. The angler is fighting the fish, chasing him down wherever he swims. The mates are making sure that the fish doesn’t get cut off or lost because of a tangle. The someone else yells, “I got one too!” yup, summertime action is fun, there is a lot of fish to be caught out there and this is the best time of the year to go fishing for action.
Most of the fish we are catching are bonitos. They are not very good eating fish, but they are fun to catch because of how strong a fighter they are. We bring them in and make bait out of them for the rest of the year. Wherever the bonitos are, there are predator fish soon to follow. Along with the bonitos we’ve caught a lot of kingfish this week as well. Kingfish are good eating, especially if you eat them fresh. The kings we’ve been catching this week have all been around 10-12 pounds. We caught some bigger 20 pounders last week. Also cobia have been showing up, particularly in the afternoons. This week, we’ve boated a 60 pound cobia on the sport fishing boat, and on one of the drift boat trips, we caught a double header cobia with both of them being about 30 pounders.
Fort Lauderdale Sportfishing boats have been catching some big fish this week as well. A couple huge bull sharks were caught yesterday while shark fishing off the Ft. Lauderdale beach. They have also been catching some big kingfish, a few tuna and more bonitos than I care to count(A LOT!). All in all the summer fishing has been awesome and I hope it stays that way. I love it when we catch so many fish we’re sick of winding them in. Mahi Mahi fishing has been pretty slow these past couple weeks. But who cares with all the fish biting on the reef lately. In fact our ALL DAY dolphin trip is going to be renamed All Day Fishing Trip because the dolphin fishing has been so slow. On our Wednesday All Day fishing trip, we’ve been starting out looking for mahi mahi offshore, but usually end up on the reef catching vermillion snappers or reef trolling because the action has been so much better.
The swordfish trip has a full crowd on it tonight, so I hope they catch one. Last week sword fishing out of Ft. Lauderdale was slow, but I think this week it should be better. It’s a better phase of the moon this week. Anyway, thanks for reading my report. See ya’ll out on the rip.
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