We had an exceptional swordfishing charter this week. Captain Paul, Adam Reckert and Ashlee Fuller went offshore 15 miles off the coast of Ft Lauderdale on a daytime swordfishing trip and landed this over 400 pound swordfish. Daytime swordfishing is a somewhat newer technique, recently developed just a couple years ago. The way it works, we head out to our normal swordfishing grounds about 15 miles offshore (the same area we go night swordfishing). The depth out there is over 1200 feet of water. We drop our baits all the way to the bottom and drift for 15-20 minutes. If we haven’t gotten a bite by then, we wind up our baits and reset for another drop. On this trip, we had already made 2 drops with no bites. On the third drop, as soon as the bait hit the bottom, the fish hit. We fought the fish for about 45 minutes before we got him to the surface. He took some small runs during the course of the fight, but no fast/hard runs as you would expect from a fish this size. As soon as the fish came within sight of the boat, the fish went ballistic. He thrashed and shook his head, made a crazy fast run and jumped out of the water. We fought the swordfish for another 15 minutes before we got him to within gaffing distance. Capt Paul reached out with the ‘flying gaff’ and stuck the fish just behind his gills. Adam, the mate that day grabbed the second flying gaff and stuck him on the other side of the fishes head. It was picture perfect.
We brought the fish home and got photos with it at the dock. There was so much swordfish meat, we kept some for ourselves and gave it away to everyone we knew. It was a great day. The swordfish we catch using the daytime swordfishing technique are usually much bigger than the swordfish we catch at night. In fact, we went out on our Friday Night Swordfishing Trip this week and caught a small 50 pound swordfish. This fish was much too small to keep, so we released it. A graduate student from Nova Southeastern University (my alma-mater) was aboard. She is studying the migratory patterns of swordfish in the Atlantic. She attached a satellite tracking tag (which I was told costs more than $5,000) to the fish as we released it. Hopefully this fish will send us some great information on swordfish migration. Great swordfish trips this week and thanks to everyone that came. Its a great time to try a swordfishing charter in Ft Lauderdale. Sea you on the water.
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