Fishing Report for Ft. Lauderdale & Port Everglades

Battle with the Swords The weather man was right on this time. We caught bait quick around the bouys in 3-5 then plowed through the occasional 6 footer out to the sword grounds. We took out 66 year young, John Wheeler from Pennsylvania who has never caught a Swordfish but has caught everything else and needed this fish to complete his queast. So I took it easy on the throttles, but we were able to get the boat to skip a few times but I didn't want to push it and shatter any bones. Our first fish was on within 15 minutes on the deep line. The battle was a solid 30 minutes. We had him leadered just out of gaff range and he did a die hard run right from the boat and pulled the hook. We set up again on the same drift and as I'm putting out my last rod I threw the squid overboard and sat down to tie my weight on, within seconds the line rips off my hand and we have a sword feeding at the boat, again, same thing happened to me on our last trip out. I knew the fish felt the hook because he did a vicious head shake and spit, but he came back and wacked the squid right off the hook. We had no more squid so we rigged a blue runner but the fish never came back. Within 10 minutes the 250 line goes off pretty steady. I cranked down on this fish and he must of felt the hook set painfully because he did one of those blistering runs where I thought he was going to dump the Finnore 50 wide. He came awfully close, we must of had only a couple of hundred yards left on the spool. Over 2 hours later the fish comes boatside, the wind on leader comes on the reel, goes off the reel, comes on , comes off. This guy thrashes all over, kicks us the tail and soaks us, he did a few jumps at the boat and finally I get to stick him. We thought we had a fish over 200 pounds for sure. In the boat he was no more than 125 pounds. Still a great fish, hooked in the corner of his jaw. My digital camera wouldn't focus so my buddy had a camera that we have to develop the pictures so I will post them in a few days. After that it was 11:00 pm and we were in front of Hillsborough on the 26 14 so we came in on a 130 degree heading in with winds starting to increase. I fileted the fish back at the dock and found numerous flying fish in his belly with a few squids and also a rare sight of what looked like a head of a barracuda. It had a pointed head with fangs on its jaw line not just a row like Kingsfish or wahoo. I wonder where he was feeeding, or maybe just a lost cuda in the deep. If anyone goes out Saturday night it looks like she's going to ease up a bit from todays blast of 20-25 mph. gusts. Till next Tide, Captain Cary Hanna