The all day dolphin trip this week was just plain awesome. We caught so many fish. The fishermen were lucky enough to have Capt. Paul run the charter this week and wow did they get into the fish good today. The ocean was gorgeous and it was actually cool out. The summer heat is gone and the temperatures are a beautiful 75 degrees out this week. The fish are migrating through Fort Lauderdale now too. Baitfish are all over the reefs. Mullet, flying fish, ballyhoo, sardines and threadfin herring are just a few of the different types of small fish we saw getting chased out of the water by some of the big game fish.
We started out on the reefs because the past few days the dolphin have been in close. We were only in about 100′-200′ of water. Well, right away we started catching fish. First school of dolphin we hit was underneath a big frigate bird. Capt. Paul spotted the bird circling low to the water and trolled over close to it. Frigate birds usually follow big game fish and wait for them to chase the small flying fish and stuff out of the water. Thats when they swoop down and grab them up. Whenever you see a frigate bird working tight circles low to the water, it usually means there is a big fish near. Well, that theory panned out for us today because as soon as we got close with the boat we were hooked up with 2 big dolphins.
They ended up being the 2 biggest dolphins of the day. One of them, the bull, probably weighed around 22 pounds and his cow probably weighed about 15. The frigate bird moved off, so we put the baits back out and kept trolling. It wasn’t long before we found some more birds working. Again, as soon as we trolled close to the school we got hooked up. We probably hit 5 or 6 schools that day and every school had at least a few fish in it. I think we came in with about 20 dolphins. Well, after the dolphins slowed down and quit hitting, we decided to go to the deep spots and try our luck at some bottom fishing.
Well the deep spots were working just as good as the dolphin were biting earlier. The second we hit the bottom we were getting bites. Snappers, snappers and more snappers. We probably caught over 50 vermillion snappers today. Well, by that time we had a full day of fishing done, so we headed in. It took us about 2 and a half hours to filet all the fish we caught today. Fileting the fish was a lot of work, but who cares when the fish are biting this good. The last photo here is what the half day boat caught, and they did pretty good too. The Fort Lauderdale deep sea fishing is awesome guys, so let’s get out there and do some fishing!
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