Fishing Report

The second and final leg of the south Florida Swordfish series, called the Miami Swordfish tournament took place over the weekend. Once again I was fishing with my friends on the "Get Lit" out of Coral Gables, Florida. Going into this tournament we were in second place in the series with 200 points, the Jichi was in first. We headed out the first night a little early so we could catch plenty of live bait. The baitfishing was excellent and we managed to catch enough bluerunners for the two night tournament. Lines were in at 7:30 p.m. so we made our way out to the swordfish grounds, about 15 miles from the beach. Making sure all our tackle was ready to go we were deciding on which depth to fish and how to stagger all 6 lines. We usually fish half our lines with live bait and the other half with rigged dead squid.

   The first night started slow with only a few hookups and no releases. We hadn't seen anything until about 9:30 p.m. when our tip rod on the bow bent over slowly. Peter Miller reeled quickly and we were on. About five minutes later we had a 45 lb. swordfish to the boat. That was the second release of the night. There were two more fish caught that night totalling 4 fish out of 14 boats fishing. The second night also started slow until about 10:00p.m. Then the bite just went crazy. There were alot of swords being hooked the next two hours. We managed to catch one early which put us in first place but then lost the lead to "My Sea Cin" which boated two fish and released one. We had hooked two more fish that night but pulled the hooks on both of them. One had seemed to be pretty big giving Peter about a 45 minute battle before pulling the hook. Our team was still in second place with minutes left in the tournament when the Deja Blue called in a hookup. They fought that fish for about an hour and boated it. The fished weighed in at 201 lbs. knocking us off by one point(we had 2 releases for 200 points and if you boat a legal size fish you get 1 pt. per lb.)wow! that sucked. Well thats fishing and anything can happen. It was a great time anyway and we manged to take third place. Many thanks to the crew of the Get Lit, Kit Toomey, Peter Miller, Capt. Quinten, John Cooper, and Kelley.

  Aside from the swordfishing the dolphin fishing and the bottom fishing has been excellent after hurricane Ike passed near us. Boats that have been getting offshore have been finding good numbers of large sized dolphin averaging 8 lbs. The deep drop bottom fishing has been great for tilefish and snowy grouper. Like I've said many times that when you get any tropical weather system moving through the area the fishing can get pretty good.