Mahi-Mahi have been what’s biting off Fort Lauderdale these past few weeks. Almost every day we’ve been hitting a school or two out there on our fishing charters. Most of the mahi-mahi have been 5-8 pounds, just a bit bigger than the normal summer schoolie dolphins. Very few big ones have been caught. All the mahi-mahi have been about the same size and traveling in small schools of 6-10 fish. It’s fun to hit a school of mahi-mahi out there. You’re trolling along, and out of nowhere 6 fish are behind the boat jumping with a couple more fish swimming right up to the boat. It can be chaotic at times when there are more fish around the boat than we have anglers to catch them, but I love that kind of chaos.
Both the sportfishing boats and the drift fishing boats have been getting into the mahi-mahi out there. On our Wednesday all day dolphin trip this week, we not only caught a nice mess of dolphin, but we also caught a 35 pound wahoo. That was a nice surprise. With all the storms activity to the south of us, the Gulf Stream is bringing a lot of debris right into our backyard. We’ve been finding logs, trees and boards floating out there. Around the floating debris is almost always a few mahi-mahi or a hungry wahoo. Beautiful weedlines and color changes have been forming up offshore as well. It’s been really easy to find stuff to fish along side out there.
On the reef have been some schools of kingfish, bonitos and blackfin tuna. The tuna have been small guys, around 5 or 6 pounders. The kingfish average 8-10 pounds with a bigger one here and there. The kings have started biting really good for us out there. The morning drift trip caught their limit of kingfish yesterday and the charter sport fishing boats have been catching their limits almost every day. The fishing is very good in Ft Lauderdale right now, and we have sailfish season to look forward to in October, November and December. It’s a great time to get out there and do some deep sea fishing.
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