Live Baiting for Kingfish
Report Date: January 8, 2015
It's been a while since my last fishing report here in Fort Lauderdale. First, I want to thank and wish a very Happy New Year to all my customers for fishing with us this past year. Together, we are looking forward to 2015. This Holliday season was my busiest ever, and unfortunately, we had to deal with mechanical issue the day before Christmas.
Now back to fishing, on Christmas day, a very good client, Andre Clara and Justin, booked us for day and wanted to go fishing really bad so we decided to use our smaller boat. Before leaving the inlet we bought a dozen live goggle eyes and some pilchards from the bait boats. We headed out of the inlet and set up a little north of the whistle buy in 130'. We had no current, but a pretty good northwest wind. We put out 2 goggle eyes on the kite and one deep one. In no time, a big kingfish took one of the kite baits and Clara was real happy to catch her first kingfish.
Then we anchored on a wreck in 130' and set the kite again. We also put out a deep bait and caught a variety of bottom fish. It was long before another big kingfish hit the one of the kite baits - another one in the box!
With the boat at the shop, I had people who called me and asked me to fish on their boat - so one day I did. On our way out they mentioned to me that they had never caught a fish on their boat! I was glad I brought some of my equipment and also bought some live goggle eyes. We fished near Hillsboro inlet for a few hours and caught 2 big kingfish.
The weather here in Fort Lauderdale has been very nice and warm, but the fishing has been up and down. Some days trolling will produce more bites and more fish, but most of our half day trips we like to stick to live bait fishing and hopefully catch a big fish. If the bite doesn't come, we'll troll some feathers for an hour to finish the trip, and more than likely, we will catch some tuna and skipjack.
New Year's Day we fished again with the same client who fished with us on the 25th of December. This time, we fished south of Port Everglades with beautiful nice and sunny weather, but no current. I started to search for some fish and caught 2 decent kingfish right way and 2 nice size silky sharks - which have been very common in recent days. Then we tried some wreck fishing and caught a few amberjack and a nice rainbow runner. We trolled back home and caught some skipjack tunas and blackfin tunas.
The sailfish in our area have been hard to find lately, hopefully this cold front will bring them down and improve fishing at the same time.
Good Luck & Tight Lines,
Capt. Mario Cote
No Vacansea Sportfishing
954-632-9340
