April Means Hot Fishing

Report Date: April 18, 2014

The fishing continues to be very good and if you ever wanted to catch a sailfish, I don’t think you could have gone wrong these past few weeks. We had a couple of double digit days (catching 10 or more sailfish in a day) and a bunch of days with 5 or more. The timing could not have been better. We had our last sailfish tournament of the year called the Final Sail. I was captaining the new 43 SeaVee Fisharound with our tournament team. We had an up and down season but I felt confident going in to the last tournament that we would do well. After all, the tourney was based in Miami which I fish everyday and I had a pretty good idea where the fish would be. As soon as the tournament started fish were being called in and we were in the hunt. We had 6 sailfish releases within the first hour and a half and were somewhere in the top 5. As the day progressed the bite slowed down a bit but we managed to catch 2 more which gave us 8 sailfish releases and had us in 2nd place. About an hour left we made our last move of the day and with 10 minutes of lines out we hooked a double header and caught them both. That double moved us into 1st place and most importantly gave us 1st place daily calcuttas, which were worth $54K for Day 1. We ended up the day catching 10 out 14 sailfish and were leading the pack. The second day we started basically in the same area and again there was a pretty good morning bite. We caught 5 sailfish in the first couple of hours, which had us in the lead up until noontime when the team Sailsmen got into a pack of fish and pushed up past us and pretty much secured 1st place. With 30 seconds left in the tournament we were still in second place but the Team Get Lit hook a doubleheader and caught them both to move them into 2nd place and knocked us down to third. It's ironic, because that was the team that we knocked back from 1st to 2nd the day before. We still ended up with over $87K in winnings and ended the year on a high note. We caught 18 out of 23 sailfish that weekend. The team Sailsmen won with 21 releases and Get Lit got 2nd with 19 releases.

As we are now fully into April, the springtime fishing is starting to materialize. We have already caught a few blackfin tunas, including one tuna that was pushing at least 38 pounds. We also have caught some huge kingfish. The biggest king we weighed was 48 pounds but that same day we had one bite clean through the wire while I had him on the leader that I would safely say was every bit of 60 pounds. Now that is a big kingfish. With the big kings, tunas and sails around, it’s no wonder that April and May are my two favorite months to fish in Miami.

April is completely booked up and May is very close but there are still a few days open. Give me a call and lets go get em!!

Tight Lines,
Capt. Dean Panos

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