A line from one of my favorite books, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” pretty much sums up the fishing this week in Fort Lauderdale. We had some awesome trips where we hit wahoo, mahi-mahi or some big fish off the wrecks and we had some trips where we couldn’t get a bite no matter what we tried. The good news is that the fish are out there, they just aren’t making it easy on us. Dolphin are showing up offshore, in approx 500-600ft of water. That’s only a couple miles off our coast, so you don’t need to go super far offshore to find them. It’s best to go trolling for them as you can cover a lot more ground on the move with your lures out. Our trip yesterday was trolling and found some frigate birds flying overhead. They hit a nice school of mahi-mahi and ended up with a great catch. A few big wahoo were also caught this week. We catch them trolling as well, usually on our deep planer baits. Wahoo love deep trolled lures. This is a good month for wahoo in South Florida, as you can catch them at just about any place and at any time. You just need to run over them.
Tunas are also biting very good. They are mostly the small to medium sized tunas, but sometimes a big one takes the bait. They are all keepers though and excellent eating size. We had a fishing charter on our higher capacity vessel, the Mary B III and they caught a ton of blackfin tunas, one big blackfin tuna and about 20 big, fat vermillion snappers. Not a bad catch! Tunas are popping up on the reefs, especially in the afternoons. We find them busting small baitfish on the surface and you can see a field of splashes on the top of the water where they are feeding. We troll around these fields of tuna with some natural feathers and small, streamline lures for the best results, and we can usually catch a nice bunch of them before we spook the school and they disappear.
Wrecks are holding some nice fish too. Some big amberjacks are showing up on our 200-300ft deep shipwrecks as they always do this time of year. This is the month of the amberjack’s migration through south Florida as they congregate around the wrecks to feed on the abundance of small fish that also congregate on the wrecks. I’m not sure where they go after they move through our waters, but they will be here through the end of June and then disappear. Groupers, cobia, snapper and tilefish are also biting good around these shipwrecks. When we can’t find anything trolling, hitting the wrecks is a good, high-percentage way to put fish in the boat. To sum it all up, there is some good fishing out there but the fish are not making it easy on us. You just have to fish hard and put in the time. Good luck to everyone fishing this week with us. I’ll sea ya on the water.
