Fishing Fort Lauderdale on Happy Day Today with Capt. Zsak
Tony and Jessie Lambert, along with their daughters, Alyssa and Abbie, from Mississippi chartered the Happy Day Today along with the Topshotfishing team to do some big game deep sea sport fishing in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
It was a lovely day – a breeze out of the east at 7 mph, blue skies, seas running 1-2 ft.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the dock lines were in 120 ft. of water at the sea buoy in Fort Lauderdale, which is 1.8 miles from shore. If you venture off a ¼ of a mile further, you would find yourself in 500 ft. of water due to our extreme drop off. We started off with two #8 plainers, one with a 3 ½ blue reflector drone spoon and the other with a chartreuse sea witch in front of a double hooked Bonito strip. For surface baits we had two Ballyhoos and two Bonito strips and a daisy chain teaser.
We started off trolling over the reefs, zig zagging back and forth from 80 ft to 200 ft of water and targeting some of our 34 artificial wrecks located in Fort Lauderdale Broward County. Any type of structure, natural or man-made, will hold bait fish and in return the predators will not be too far behind. As we trolled back and forth, the family took turn angling and catching Bonitos and Kingfish. I noticed three man- of-war birds working an area so I headed over to them. To my surprise, there was a very tight ball of bait fish (cigar minnows). We trolled around the bait fish with no strikes, so I told Mark, our mate, to get out the cast net and throw it – we were rewarded with a very large catch of the cigar minnows. From there we went into Plan B – live bait fishing. After an hour of live bait fishing, we had no bites, so we went back to trolling.
I headed towards one of my favorite artificial wrecks located in 210 ft. of water off of Fort Lauderdale. As I went over the wreck, I could see on the depth recorder predators close to the wreck. I took one engine out of gear and idled the other engine to allow the bait to sink deeper. One of the plainer rods bent over and we were hooked up with a 20 lb Kingfish. I kept repeating this technique, and we were rewarded with a couple more 20 lb Kingfish and a Black Grouper weighing 18 lbs. With 7 Kingfish, 6 Bonitos, two Barracudas and one Grouper it was time to head back.
All the anglers retired into the a/c salon aboard the Happy Day Today for the trip back to the dock at Bahia Mar 801 Seabreeze Blvd. Fort Lauderdale 33316.
For a successful and adventurous deep sea fishing charter Fort Lauderdale FL for Sailfish, Shark, Bonito, Mackerel, Swordfish, Snapper, Wahoo, Tuna, Mahi Mahi and Grouper contact Captain Zsak. - 954-309-7457 or email us at tzsak@bellshouth.net Website: www.topshotfishing.com.
