Florida Fishing out of Dania and Fort Lauderdale - Offshore

[JohnMckroidJr]

There have been a couple of Wahoo taken off kayaks recently, so last Tuesday I made a trip out of the Port of Fort Lauderdale.

I left Cox Landing and made it out of the harbor by 5 a.m. My first spot to target bait was a submerged rock pile just south of the breakwater entrance.
The area was full of tarpon. Eventually, one of them ate and destroyed my Crappie jig Gangnon. The next spot was Eurojaxs - a submerged breakwater with depths at the top around 6ft and edges down to 20ft. I metered a ton of bait with no biters.
Eventually, I found 8 blue runners and a goggle eye off the Dania Beach pier. This was super slow bait fishing.

By the time I got out to the 3rd reef, The sun was already up. I missed the dawn bite, and fishing was slow AF.

[JohnMckroidJr]

After an hour and a half of zilch slow trolling baits, I headed out deeper to my grouper spot. I meter a fair amount of fish, but the fish seemed to have lock jaws. After drifting and jigging over the spot about a dozen times, I eventually snagged a small Amberjack in the belly.

[JohnMckroidJr]

I decided to head out to 300ft and jig for Blackfin. No luck with blackfin and a small Little Tuny was my only strike. Normally I would throw these back, but I was so desperate for fresh fish, that I decided to keep it for Poke.

[JohnMckroidJr]

After jigging deep for about an hour, I went back in shallower one more time to drift my grouper spot. Eventually, I connected, but luck was not with me, I got smoked on my 65lb braid with and 80lb leader.

After the loss, I decided to give the wrecks of Fort Lauderdale a try. It took about an hour to motor across the shipping channel to the wreck zone. There are 4 wreck structures within 1000ft of each other.

I metered a lot of bait on the wrecks. I did several drifts over them for zilch. I tried trolling baits around them for zilch. Eventually, I broke out the Sabiki to see if I could jig up a Little Tunny to troll for Wahoo.

[JohnMckroidJr]

I slowly trolled the Little Tunny 120ft down on a downrigger in around 200ft of water between wrecks in the area. After about an hour of trolling the clicker started screaming as the line was pulling out. I had a solid strike. I kept the kayak motoring with tension on the strike as I cranked up the downrigger ball and reeled in the surface-trolled bait.

I had high hopes for a Wahoo, but they faded away at deep color. It was still a nice King Mackerel and not a shark. After the king, I trolled for about another hour for zilch before calling it a day and heading for the barn.

[f'nsabiki]

Nice fish!