Drift Fishing Report
It’s a great season right now for drift fishing in Ft Lauderdale. Spring is a great season to catch smoker kingfish, blackfin tuna and mahi-mahi along the reef. Bottom fishing for snapper and grouper is good this time of year as well. During our morning and afternoon drift trips, we’re catching a good amount of kingfish between 5-10 pounds. Every so often, we’ll catch a giant smoker king upwards of 30 pounds. Mahi-mahi, which are usually an offshore fish, will come in on the reef during the spring for some easy grazing on baitfish. On a few trips this week, in only 100′ of water, we’ve been suddenly jumped by a school of mahi-mahi. It’s good to see them showing up so early.
Night anchor fishing is excellent this time of year. Yellowtails are biting really good, making the night trip our best trip for action. Mixed in with the yellowtails are always mangrove and mutton snappers. Mutton snappers are the bigger snappers that we catch, reaching sizes of 10-15 pounds. Mangroves (we call them ‘grovers’), can get to be 5-6 pounds. Red groupers are biting like mad, but unfortunately they are out of season for a couple more weeks. We’ll get them soon!
Sport Fishing Report
Spring is my favorite sportfishing season of the whole year. Why? Because just about every type of big game fish that inhabits Ft Lauderdale bites this time of year. Kingfish and tuna are biting on the reef, snapper and groupers on the bottom, mahi-mahi and wahoo are biting offshore, wreck fishing is awesome for amberjacks and sometimes cobia, and this is the best season of the year for shark fishing on the edge of the gulfstream. It’s easier to say what’s not biting this time of year. Our catches during the spring fishing months make us look really, really good 🙂
A lot of fishermen that come fishing with us this time of year are looking to catch the undisputed monster of all big game fish, sharks. Ft Lauderdale is awesome because of the annual shark migration that occurs just 1 mile off our coast over the next few months. Hammerheads, thresher sharks, makos, bull sharks, duskys and tiger sharks are some of the shark species we’ll catch between now and the end of June. Best technique for this is to fly fishing kites with live baits on the edge of the gulfstream with a couple big bloody baits down on the bottom. On the kite baits, you can catch sharks, sailfish, tuna and mahi-mahi. On the bottom baits, you’re primarily looking for sharks but I’ve caught some strange and unexpected fish on those big bloody bottom baits.
The wreck fishing is really awesome and I make at least a few deep drops around the wrecks on all my charters. It’s a great way to catch some quick big game fish. Amberjacks are the primary big game resident around the wrecks and are abundant this season. Groupers, snappers, cobia and barracuda all thrive among these shipwrecks also. I love wreck fishing this time of year because we can go out there and catch some 40-50 pound fish really quick.
Fort Lauderdale is a hotspot for fishing in the spring, so come on out fishing; The water is fine!
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