Happy New Year! The Hooked Up team hopes your holiday season was great and that you are ready for some sportfishing. The New Year brings starts our winter fish migration full steam , we will be seeing sailfish, hammerhead sharks, thresher sharks, dolphin fish, some early kingfish, groupers, amberjacks, bonito's and barracudas.
We started the New Year fishing with Tom, Tommy, Chris and Carly from Detroit, Michigan and this group got the year started out right, they landed a huge sailfish.
Next up was Zack, Chris, Patrick, Craig, Mike and Tim all from South Carolina. Well, it is sailfish time, so we decided to put some live bait out of the kites and see if we could get lucky. Well, we got lucky, but not with the sailfish we ended up catching 2 dolphin fish, 2 nice size kingfish and one big bonito.
On the 8th, the boys from Pennsylvania spent the day fishing with us; we had Lou and his son Lou, Scott, George and Bob with us for a day of deep sea fishing. We started out the day by getting some live goggle eyes (bait fish) from the bait boat, and then we went right to it. We put up our kites and suspended the live baits from the kite and we got pretty lucky, we caught 7 kingfish, one big amberjack, one big spinner shark and a monster sailfish. As a matter a fact, this was the biggest sailfish ever caught on the Hooked Up, it was 102 inches long. Way to go guys.
Well today is kind of a special day for fishing of the coast of Fort Lauderdale. It happens to be my birthday so I was looking to start my new year in a big way. It all started back in early Dec when I got a call from a lady in Michigan named Billy; she wanted to buy her husband Everett and his best friend Zack a fishing trip here in South Florida. Well fishing has been slow so I told Zack and Everett about a plan I had to go high speed trolling off shore and try to find some dolphin fish and maybe a blue marlin then once we got far enough offshore and into the swordfish grounds we would drop a bait down about 1750 feet of water and see if we could get lucky and catch a swordfish. Well, we did not find any dolphin fish on the way out but the water looked good so we got ready to do our drop. The first drop hit the bottom and we waited about 30 minutes with no bites so we reeled up the bait and made a move. Second drop same results no bites on the third drop we thought we'd try something different so we put 2 baits on one line thinking it would double our chances, but the second we hit bottom we got hung up on the bottom and lost all our gear. Well we thought one more shot and sure enough our mate JJ said he thought he saw the rod get a little tap so we started bringing it up, at that point the rod bent over and we were Hooked Up. It took us 2 hours and 40 minutes to catch this sea monster; it was not a swordfish but a monster thresher shark. I guess if you're not going to catch a lot than you should catch a really big one and that's what we did.
On the 12th, Matt, Alex, Johnny, Mike and Sebastian from New England spent a few hours fishing on the Hooked Up before they watched their home football team win another game. I'll let you guess who their home team is? Well fishing was kind of slow so we went for all or nothing and I guess it was their lucky day because not only did their football team do it again but they ended up landing a nice hammerhead shark. Nice going guys but remember the season is not over yet!! (LOL)
