Fishing Reports
Happy New Year
Report Date: January 2, 2017
I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays and wish everyone a healthy and prosperous New Year. I would like to thank all my clients from last year for making it a great year. We fished with both new customers and customers who have been fishing with me for 20 years. Its so awesome to watch kids that fished with me 20 years ago are now young adults and some even have started their own families. 2016 was a great year with lots of memorable catches and lots of fun.
I look forward to 2017 and hoping to have some great trips this year. Early season sailfishing in the fall was absolutely great but the past few weeks the sailfishing has slowed down a bit. Part of it is due to some green water that has moved in and also the lack of current. Current is more instrumental than the color of water and both conditions can change overnight and they usually do. It is uncommon to have no current for more than a few days, so it is just a matter of time until things get rolling again. The good news is for the most part we are still catching 1 to 3 sailfish a day along with some kingfish, blackfin tunas, mahis, bonitos etc. Another factor has been cold fronts. We did get a cold front last week and are expecting another one by Friday. This will also help to get the fish moving and biting again.
Besides sailfishing we went to Bimini last week and although the wahoo fishing was slow (we did get some though) the deep dropping for snappers was pretty good. We caught yellow eye snappers, queen snappers, and wenchman snappers. I do have a few more wahoo trips planned and last year the wahoo fishing was better in February and March than it was in December.
I haven’t done any daytime swordfishing this past month but have heard of quite a few fish caught and have heard of multiple fish per day caught as well. Most of the swords caught were also decent size and I would say quite a few 250 pounders and up were caught. This time of year we mostly go sailfishing but if the weather is good we are open for some daytime swordfishing as well.
So far about half of January and half of February are already booked which means that the other half of each month is open, so now is the time to lock in your winter kite fishing trips. Besides sailfish, you never know what else you can catch. The past few years we have caught quite a few yellowfin tunas in January through March while kite fishing besides the mahis, kings, wahoo etc. you can always catch while kite fishing in South Florida. So go ahead and give me a call and lets go fishing!
Tight Lines,
Capt. Dean Panos