Fishing Report

The Sailfish and Swordfish bite has been great this November. We have been seeing alot of Sailfish balling bait off of the reef of Key Largo. This is when multiple Sailfish gang up on a school of baitfish and sort of corral the bait into a ball. The Sailfish then take turns darting into the ball eating the baitfish. You can usually spot this happening froma distance by spotting birds working over the feeding frenzy. If you time it right you can run up to the ball of bait and cast live baits into the middle of the bait ball. Since the hook bait looks like it is struggling when it hits the water the Sailfish usually single that bait out and will often take it.

   When the weather has been calm we've been managing to get offshore for the Swordfish in the evening. 20 miles offshore is where we usually target these fish so calm weather is very beneficial. My angler, Scott Harter from Chicago had scheduled us for a Sailfish/Swordfish combo trip on Thursday. The weather was good for both types of fishing. We had just enough wind for kite fishing which is the prefered method of Sailfishing, and it was still calm enough to head offshore Key Largo in the evening for the Swordies. My mate, Chris and I decided that Conch reef off of Key Largo would be the best spot to Sailfish. Conch Reef is usually an excellent spot to sailfish off of Key Largo because the deep water cuts in close to the reef acting as a funnel for migrating Sailfish. Chris and I put out two Kites with three baits off each kite. I had just finished explaining to Scott how we drop back to the fish when we get bit, when we had our first Sail on one of our short baits. The Sailfish ate a live google-eye and Scott did a perfect job of setting the hook. The fight lasted a good 15 minutes and at the end we released a beautiful 65lb. Sailfish. We put the kites back out and fished for another hour. It was starting to get dark so we decided to reel the baits in and head offshore for the Swordfish bite. As we were bringing in our baits a Sailfish was chasing one of the google-eyes up to the boat. We quickly dropped the bait back to him and eventually Scott caught his second Atlantic Sail off of Key Largo.

     It was a 15 mile ride out to the Swordfish grounds from our Sailfish spot. Chris had rigged the rods and bait on the way out. Our Swordfish tackle is very different from our Sailfish gear. We like to use 80lb. stand up tackle with penn 50 or 70 internationals. An excellent reel with a smooth drag system. Our bait of choice is either whole dead squid or live blue-runners. We usually fish a combination of both. The wind had started to pick up a little but it was still o.k. to fish. Our baits were set out at about 6:15 p.m. At 6:20 the #2 rod with a rigged dead squid set at 200 ft below the surface started to click off slowy. This is typical of Swordfish to swim off with their prey slowly. Scott started reeling quickly and after a minute of reeling the rod finally started to bend over. The fish came in rather quickly to the boat and then all of a sudden peeled off about 200 yards of line. It took Scott about an hour to land a really nice Sword. We estimated the fish at about 80lbs. It was an excellent trip off of Key Largo, 2 Sails and 1 nice Swordfish.