SPRING TIME!

Report Date: March 27, 2008

If variety is what you want, these next two months will be the best time to fish in South Florida. Spring has arrived in South Florida and in the last two weeks we have seen hints of what the fishing will be like for a few months. This is definitely my favorite time of year to fish in Miami. Don’t get me wrong, I love catching sailfish and those double digit release days are always a lot of fun. But now combine a few sailfish releases (and it is still possible for double digit releases), add a few blackfin tunas, some dolphin and kingfish, possibly a wahoo or cobia, and now we are talking a lot of action. That has been the case in the past week or so. I did have one slow day were we caught only a few dolphin, but all the other days in the past week and a half have been awesome and I really have had some great clients on board.

We are still catching sailfish and our best day this week we caught 5 out of 8 sails that we hooked. The past few trips we have also caught our first few blackfin tunas. We caught two blackfins yesterday and the largest one was almost 30 pounds. Besides the blackfins that are starting to show up, the kingfish are here. We had one day that we really caught a lot of kings and they were decent size as well. Our biggest king that day was 35 pounds and we caught another one about 25 pounds, as well as quite a few in the 8 – 15 pound range. Besides the kings, we also caught 4 cobias with the largest cobia just under 45 pounds. It was an action packed day as we also caught a sailfish and a bunch of bonitas.

The past few trips, the wind has been blowing out of the NE and East and that has pushed in some dolphin. We haven’t caught any really big mahi’s, but there have been quite a few of the larger schoolies around. Not only are they a lot of fun, but they surely are good on the grill.

This is also the time of year that we can offer a greater flexibility in our trips. The sun doesn’t go down until much later, which gives us more hours to fish. We can now offer longer 12 hour trips for the real hardcore anglers, we can offer later starts, or we can also offer late afternoon trips for the people that just can’t take the whole day off from work. In my opinion, the best bite in the spring usually occurs after 4:00pm anyway, so let’s take advantage of it!

With that said, now is definitely the time to book your spring trips and also to book your summer trips for the Bahamas. I will start heading back over to the Bahamas next month and will hopefully spend some time there this summer. The fishing rules have been changed back and are better suited for the vesting anglers.

Tight Lines,
Capt. Dean Panos

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