The Swordfish bite off Key Largo and Miami has been excellent this week with lots of big fish up to 400 lbs. being taken. The last two nites we have fished, we had a total of 8 swordfish bites and caught three of them. One of the fish we missed was approxitmately 300 lbs. We got a close look at the monster as it swam right next to the boat right after the bite. After about an hour battle the hook finally pulled. Our main target that night was to try and hook a Swordfish on fly tackle, a very challenging technique. We had a dead squid rigged without a hook to act as a teaser so if we raised a fish on that teaser the angler could place the fly next to the teaser to try and switch the fish towards the fly. While waiting for a Swordfish to bite the teaser we also placed our conventional Swordfish spread out which consists of five lines staggered at different depths. We used a combination of dead squid and live blue runners as our baits. We kept these lines in the back of the boat while the angler with the fly was in the bow repeatedly casting his fly out and letting it sink near the teaser bait hoping for some luck in getting a bite. While the angler was in the bow casting the big fish ate one of our conventional rods with a live blue runner as bait. The Swordfish quickly swam to the surface and was racing around the top back and forth, and two or three times it came right next to the boat to let us know just how big he was. It eventually became tangled with the angler's fly line and started to run off a lot of line. With the big fish running with the fly in tow, we cleared the teaser line to avoid any more tangles. While we were bringing up the teaser another Swordfish around 60 lbs. was chasing the squid right up to the boat. It kept trying to eat the squid and you could have reached out and touched the Swordfish. It was that close. It would have been a perfect situation for the bait and switch with the fly, however our fly was tangled and being dragged offshore behind a really big Swordfish. Eventually we pulled the hook on the fish and all we got back was our fly. If was very dissapointing to lose such a big fish, but it was very exciting to have witnessed the beautiful fish and ever thing that happened. After licking our wounds we set our lines out again and within 20 minutes we had another big fish on. Again we pulled the hook. I told the anglers not to worry, "you just got to keep swinging the bat". It finally paid off. After an hour of drifting we hooked a double header of Swordfish. Fortunally we caught both of them. We kept one of them weighing 62lbs. and tagged and released the other one. What an awesome night! The next two months are usually very productive for Swordfish especially around the full moon so hope for calm nights so we can get out there and try again.
The daytime offshore fishing has still been good for bottom fish i.e. snapper, amberjack, and grouper around the deep wrecks in 200 to 300 ft. We like to use live bait on the bottom for these fish, while some of the bigger mutton snappers have been eating dead split backed goggle-eyes. A few dolphin around, but the Sailfish are starting to show up and the boats that are targeting them are getting a few shots a day at them off Key Largo. Look for the Sailfishing to just keep getting better as we start to get some cold fronts through the area to push these fish south towards Key Largo.