Nice bull dolphin caught offshore fishing in Fort Lauderdale
The fishing offshore of Fort Lauderdale is excellent this week. There are some big dolphin biting about 6-10 miles offshore and lots of schoolie sized dolphins biting too. We are finding the bigger dolphin near to and underneath the big frigate birds that are also fishing offshore. Frigate birds tend to follow bigger game fish around. The reason they do that is because they cannot get their wings wet (if they do, they cannot fly). So their M.O. is to follow surface swimming big game fish (sailfish, marlin, bull dolphin and sometimes tuna) around and wait for them to scare a school of baitfish out of the water. While the baitfish are jumping out of the water trying to escape the big predator fish, frigate birds will swoop down and grab the fish with it’s talons. Frigate birds are big birds and I’ve seen them catch and carry away some pretty big fish. Spotting a frigate bird offshore is a great find and we usually will get some big bites fishing near to them.
Dolphin caught offshore Fort Lauderdale
Schoolie dolphin are biting out there too. We usually find the schoolie dolphin swimming along a weedline or schooled up under a floating board or other piece of debris. When these dolphin are small (3-8 pounds), they school up because there is safety in numbers. We’ve had a couple offshore swordfishing trips lately and have done well on dolphin fishing on the way out to swordfish grounds, either finding a bunch of schoolie dolphins or a couple big bull dolphins. Swordfishing offshore has also been exceptional this month. We’ve had 8 swordfish trips this month, caught swordfish on 6 of the 8 trips (double swordfish on 2 of our swordfishing trips). One of the swordfish we landed was approximately 400 pounds. They are biting on both the daytime and night time trips, but lately I think the daytime bite has been somewhat better.
Big swordfish caught offshore swordfishing in Fort Lauderdale
Last week, the Mary B III on the 8 hour all day trip caught 2 white marlin, one each day on 2 consecutive days. The first day they had a bite on another billfish that also acted like a white marlin, but we missed the fish and never confirmed the identity of it. White marlin are very rare fish in Fort Lauderdale and to catch 2 white marlin in 2 days shows you that the territory offshore is hot and lively. The all day trips and our sportfishing charters are the trips going offshore and fishing big. There are some big fish biting offshore fishing in Fort Lauderdale these days.
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