Troy Caraway and his wife, Lindsay, along with their sons, Liam and Colby, and their daughter, Blake, were vacationing in Fort Lauderdale from Houston Texas. While in Fort Lauderdale, they chartered the Top Shot Sportfishing charter boat team for a private deep-sea charter boat sport fishing trip. As the Caraway’s boarded the boat, they were greeted by Captain Zsak, and his mate.
Before we left the dock, it started raining, so we gave it a half hour. As the rain slowed down to a trickle, we left the boat slip, and the by the time we put out the lines for fishing, the rain had stopped altogether.
We started out our fishing trip catching baitfish, and we got a handful in the boat using small jigs. There was a strong current, so we started trolling south of Fort Lauderdale into the current in 100 ft. of water with two deep planner lines and 4 surface lines. I trolled from shallow to deep waters and back to shallow again when I marked a school of fish on the depth sounder. I made a turn on the fish, and we had 4 lines come down at once - three surface and one deep line - all of them were pulling drag. Everyone on the boat grabbed a rod and started fighting the fish. After all the smoke cleared, we had three large Bonitas in the boat with one getting away. We went back to trolling and working the same area in 130 feet of water. The deep planner line went off, and we hooked a nice Kingfish. I stayed in that area, and we got one more Kingfish bite.
The group wanted to try for something larger, so we decided to put the live baits out. We put out two surface baits and one deep bait. I slow-trolled the baits out a little deeper to 200 ft. of water. As I worked this real nice edge, all of a sudden one of the baits started getting scared, and we had a fish on. The mate fed him more line, and within a couple of minutes, the line became tight – we had a Sailfish on! The Sailfish started jumping and tail-walking. After a long and hard fight, we got the Sailfish up to the boat, removed the hooks and released the Sailfish. As soon as I got up to the bridge, the reel started peeling out line, and this time we had a Barracuda on, which gave us a good fight.
After a great morning fishing, it was time to head back to the dock. The happy anglers retired into the a/c salon watching the plasma TV and enjoying the relaxing trip back to the dock at Bahia Bar Yachting Center, 801 Seabreeze Blvd. Fort Lauderdale 33316.