Bonita Bonanza

Report Date: August 10, 2012

  Summer is here and boy is it hot. We haven’t had much tropical disturbance this summer so the seas have been flat calm with plenty of Florida sunshine.

There has been lots of action on the reef the past few weeks. The massive schools of bonitas are in along with some nice kingfish, sailfish, and wahoo. Unfortunately, bonitas are not edible, but they are a blast to catch on light tackle and artificials. With live bait for chum these fish will hit anything that touches the water. They are a good fight and good practice for the novice angler. Mixed in with these big herds of bonitas are some large game fish. Big hammerhead sharks, mako, thresher, and the occasional marlin are feasting on bonitas this time of year.

  Aside from the reef fishing I have done several offshore mahi trips. The dolphin still haven’t shown up in any numbers this summer. This is very frustrating because we tend to burn lots of fuel, time, and effort searching for them. Fortunately if you do find them they have been large schoolies with some nice gaffers mixed in. Swordfishing has still been good both in the day and night. A friend of mine landed one pushing 600lbs a few days ago.

  I’ve done one Bimini trip and one Florida keys trip this month. Both were productive with lots of nice yellowtails, mutton snappers, mangrove snapper, and a few big cubera snappers mixed in. I also had the benefit of doing some family trips with some small fry anglers . We generally fish the shallow patch reefs when small children are on the boat. Patch reefs are great fun for children of small ages. As we know young kids do not have the attention span of adults. By going to these reefs we can have good action of catching cero mackerel, blue porgys, grunts, trigger fish, yellow tails, and blue runners.

  I still have plenty of dates open over the next month ,and am offering a 10% discount if you mention the fishing report. So let’s get out there and bend the rod!

 

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