What a great couple of days on the sportfishing boats. We’ve been catching all kinds of cool fish. The wreck fishing has been going off! Huge groupers were caught all week. On this trip, you can see we caught 2 huge big black groupers. We were trying some drops on the shipwrecks, having already caught our limit on kingfish. We made a drop with a live bait on one of our top secret shipwrecks that we fish sometimes. Wham! Instabite! We caught a big black grouper, about an 18 pounder. I was telling the customer how we don’t catch too many of them out here and how they are kind of rare. Then we make another drop, ’cause we never leave fish biting(that’s our rule). Wham! another instabite. Guess what comes up this time? Another black grouper, and this one was almost 30 pounds. Wow, that was a pretty cool end to an already great fishing trip.
The next day we went out on another sportfishing trip. I hear a couple Fort Lauderdale and Pompano fishing boats have caught wahoo out there in the deep, so we head out on the troll. I was trolling in about 200′ of water with these 2 guys from New York. It was kind of slow to start, we only caught 1 king in the first 1/2 hour. Then BAM, a big fish bites the long planer. We were out deep and I knew it was something cool, so I yell down, “Big fish, back off the drag!!” The fish striped off a nice run, but we turned him. We get the planer up to the rod tip and Chuck started to wire him up. As soon as Chuck touched the leader, the fish started shaking his head. Without ever seeing the fish, I called down, “wahoo!” It sure was, and a nice one at that. A great rejuvination to a slow morning.
We trolled for a little while longer and caught a couple small throw back fish and some small bonitos that we threw in the livewell for later. After a while longer of trolling with no bites, we decided to go try some drops on the shipwrecks. The first spot I picked we didn’t get any bites. The bait we sent down wasn’t even nervous. I decided to go hit a different spot. A short distance away was a wreck I hadn’t tried in about 6 months. So we make a drop with a live blue runner. The rod slammed dunk as soon as we got down to the bottom. It was something big and we put the boat in gear and pulled the fish out of the wreck before he had a chance to wrap us around a rock. After a good fight, we come up with a giant warsaw grouper, estimated at 35-40 pounds. Awesome fish, something we don’t get to catch very rarely.
At this point, we were feeling pretty good about the trip. We had a few nice fish in the box, but we never leave fish biting, so we made another drop at the same spot. This time, we dropped one of the little bonitos we had in the live well from earlier in the trip. Agan, as soon as we hit the bottom we got something big on. We got the guy in the chair to fight him, and stared fighting him up to the top. This fish was fighting a lot stronger than the grouper had, so I knew it was something different. When the fish got close to the top, I saw the colors he had on him and I knew exactly what it was. “Giant golden amberjack” I called down. It was a beauty, about a 60 pounder.
By this time, we were late for our afternoon trip, so we had to head back. The fishing was great today though. Sport fishing boats have been coming in with good catches all week and Fort Lauderdale canals are covered with small finger mullet. That tells me that the mullet run down the beaches of Fort Lauderdale is about to start, which means sailfish will be early this year. We’ll see what happens, but don’t hesitate to go fishing, the fishing is red hot in South Florida right now.
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