Saturday Night 6 Hour Trip

7:30PM-1:30AM Saturday Night ONLY

We fish a 4 hour trip every night, but on Saturday Nights, we fish for 6 hours. You can sleep in on Sunday! At night we anchor and chum the water for snappers, groupers and all the multitudes of reef fish species that we catch on the bottom. Yellowtail, mangrove and mutton snappers bite especially good on the reefs of Fort Lauderdale at night. On the 6 hour trip, we have time to reach some of the spots we can’t normally fish on our 4 hour trips. Also, the late night snappper bite can sometime get really really good. With 6 hours to fish, we come in with a lot more fish!

Night Anchor Fishing

7:30PM-11:30PM every night

At night we anchor the boat and chum the water. Yellowtail snapper are abundant on the Ft Lauderdale reefs, all you have to do is chum them up. We chum the water to attract all the fish in the vicinity to come to us. We fish the bottom for yellowtail snapper, mangrove and mutton snapper, groupers, cobia, sharks, and all the other multitudes of bottom fish species that live on our reefs. The fish we catch are smaller at night, but we catch a lot more of them. And snappers are really good eating! The night trip is definitely our best trip for action.

Drift Fishing Trips on the Reef

8:30am-12:30pm and 1:30pm-5:30pm every day

Most of our fishing on our 2 daytime trips is done on the reef in about 100’ of water, about a mile offshore of Ft Lauderdale beach. We target Kingfish, Mackerel, Tuna, Bonito, Mahi Mahi, Wahoo, Snapper, Grouper, and even the occasional Sailfish. Different species bite at different times of the year but there are lots of species that are possible to catch. On our drift fishing trips, we head to our fishing spots about a mile offshore and then we shut down the engines. We let the wind and current slowly push the boat over the reefs and wrecks that we fish on. Everyone fishes off the side of the boat, fishing the surface, mid-depth or on the bottom. With 85 feet of fishing rail, the Catch My Drift is the perfect boat for drift fishing in Fort Lauderdale.

 

Fort Lauderdale Drift Fishing Trip

Drift fishing is a great way to get out fishing in Ft. Lauderdale. We run 3 four hour fishing trips every day. Our boat is the Catch My Drift, a beautiful 85′ Gulfcraft party fishing boat, coast guard certified and licensed. You won’t find a bigger, faster, or more comfortable boat in our area. We include everything you will need on your trip: rods, bait, tackle, licenses, everything. NO EXPERIENCE NECCESSARY. Our crew is experienced, professional and friendly and they are there to assist you with everything.

Awesome Catch of Some Giant Red Snappers and Grouper on Our Sportfishing Charter

Tunas, kingfish, bonitos and barracuda are also biting all over the reefs. This is a great time of year for trolling the reefs as there is a bevy of different species to provide good action for our charters. Trolling the reefs is the best fishing method to catch lots of fish and lots of variety. You can literally catch anything while trolling the Ft Lauderdale reefs, from sailfish and the rare marlin to king, Spanish and cero mackerels. You never know what you might pull in when dragging lures and rigged baits over our expansive reef system. Sometimes bottom fish come up from the bottom to grab our deeper pulling, planer baits. When our charters tell us to keep them on the fish or to just catch as many fish as we can, trolling is the best method to employ. January is the month for big kingfish, one of the largest of the mackerels. Kingfish average 4-8 pounds but can sometimes reach weights of 40+ pounds. We call these monster kingfish, ‘smoker’ kings because when they hit, they ‘smoke’ the reels by pulling drag off the rods so quickly. And also because they taste great when you cook them using a smoker (greatest fish dip of all time).

Start of the New Year With Some Fishing!

Wahoo are another gamefish that is biting extremely well. One of the fastest fish in the ocean and my personal favorite fish to eat, wahoo are an exciting gamefish that bites voraciously in the winter months. This year, with the super moons we’re having, wahoo are biting like crazy. We had some awesome days of wahoo fishing over the past few weeks and they are still biting strong. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen such good wahoo fishing in south Florida. You usually have to go to Bimini in the Bahamas or even San Salvador to catch wahoos like we have this month. Some of the wahoos reached 60+ pounds. Wahoo are crafty fish as they shy away from wire leaders and their razor sharp teeth can cut through monofilament like a knife through butter. We have to be equally crafty when catching them by not applying too much drag on the initial hookup, keeping control of their head during the fight and not letting them shake the hooks when close to the boat. With good coordination from the captain and mate, we can successfully land most of the wahoo we hook.

It’s a New Year With Lots of New Fish Biting on the Fort Lauderdale Edge

We had a great end to 2016 with some awesome catches on some large and exotic fish. We caught some huge wahoos, which are biting better this year than I have seen in long while, big red snappers, which are exceedingly rare in Fort Lauderdale and we’ve caught some big tunas, kingfish and sailfish. It was a great end to a great year. And now in 2017, a whole new batch of fish are moving through. Notably, we just had our very first cold front in Fort Lauderdale. It lasted 2 days and temperatures hit the high 50’s! Brrrrrrrrrr! That’s cold for us south Florida folk who wear sandles all year long. The cold weather did something to the fishing though. It got the sailfish snapping! We caught more sailfish in those 2 days than we had in the past 2 weeks. Sailfish love the cold weather, it gets them all frisky. This is the season for sailfish and without the cold weather, we were having a mediocre season on them. When the cold weather hit, it was like a light switch that went off and they finally started biting in respectable numbers. Glad to see them because so many anglers come from all around the world to catch these awesome gamefish.

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Goodbye 2016!

Happy New Years! We hope 2017 is your best year yet!

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays to you and your family from all of us at Fishing Headquarters!

Catch My Drift Boat Features

-Fully Air-Conditioned enclosed cabin-Ice cold A/C
-Galley equipped with refrigerator, freezer, microwave
-3 Color Fish Finders/Bottom Sonar
-VHF Radio/Sideband Radio
-GPS Satellite Navigation System
-Dinettes and bench seating inside cabin
-Live bait tank
-Giant Fish Hold with plenty of Ice
-Separate Men’s and Women’s CLEAN restrooms
-Upper sun deck access and seating
-much, much more

Some Awesome Fish Biting on our Fishing Charters This Week

There are some awesome fish biting on our fishing charters this week. I don’t know if it’s the time of year, the supermoon we just had or if there’s something in the water, but there are some unusual catches coming in this week. First off, the sailfish bite has been pretty good. This is the season when the sailfish start biting in good numbers and we haven’t even had any cold weather yet. Well, this is usually the time when the weather starts to cool down so good sailfishing is about to become awesome sailfishing. Wahoo are tearing it up out there. With the supermoon and the big tide swings, the wahoo are biting like mad. A few really nice wahoo and a bunch of medium sized ones were caught this week. Usual catches of kingfish, mackerel and bonitos are also hitting the docks.

We’ve caught some unusual fish this week. The snapper pictured above is a humongous dog snapper. I thought it was a cubera when I first saw it, it was so big. These snappers are very rare for us to catch in south Florida, especially one so large. Other strange and unusual bottom fish are biting too. We’ve caught some monster golden tilefish deep dropping in over 600ft of water. Barrelfish and oilfish are also biting. These are not usual catches for our fishing charters. Other big bottom dwellers such as warsaw grouper and some big amberjacks have been caught on our fishing charters this week. It’s been a great month for bottom fishing.

Shark fishing is also starting to light up out there. This week, we’ve caught several hammerhead sharks, a mako shark (very rare), a couple of sand bar sharks and a huge bull shark. I think this year will have some awesome shark fishing results. We’re still not fully into shark fishing season but the unusual fishing conditions had us floating out some big shark baits since the sharks were really riled up with the big moon and super tides. Glad we did because we caught some monster sharks over the past few days.

The effects of the supermoon are still being seen with extraordinary tides, strange fish and unusual catches. As we normalize, look for great catches of mahi-mahi, sailfish, wahoo and cobia to be hitting the docks in the weeks to come. Good luck to everyone fishing out there this week. I’ll sea ya on the water.


Capt. Paul Roydhouse
www.FishHeadquarters.com
754-214-7863

Wahoo and Kingfish

Nice Wahoo and Kingfish caught on our sport-fishing charter. There are a few nice fish biting on the troll. Let's go fishing! www.FishHeadquarters.com

Hello December!

Let’s make December the best month of 2016!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family from all of us at Fishing Headquarters!

Nice Catch!

Nice dolphin caught by this lucky angler on our drift fishing trip. Let's go fishing!

Windy Weather, Great Fishing!

The weather has been very windy this week. It’s kept a lot of the small boats home and even some of the big boats. We’ve been fishing every day though and let me tell you, the fishing (and the catching) has been great! Dolphin, tuna, sailfish and more are biting. The reason? the strong easterly wind. A hard east wind gets the fish chewing. It blows the seaweed and debris in closer to the shore and with it, the dolphin. If you can handle the waves, these are the conditions we wait for all year for the really good fishing. It also helps that many boats haven’t been fishing the past few days, making less competition for the fish.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! We hope you have fun and safe night! Check out these Halloween safety tips!

Sportfishing Shared and Private Charters

Our sportfishing charters are our best all around trip and they are coming in with the most impressive catches lately. Trolling the reefs is working excellent for kingfish, blackfin tuna, bonito, barracuda and sometimes even a wahoo. The action on the troll has made it difficult for us to switch over and do anything different. First rule of fishing is never to leave fish to find fish. But once we’ve caught our limit of kingfish, we often switch over just for the heck of it to try some live baiting. This past week, sailfishing has been off-the-scale! September is the beginning of sailfish season here in Ft Lauderdale. This is the time of year all the big game fishermen come down to try their luck at catching the most sought after gamefish in the ocean… Sailfish. This sailfish season started off this past week with a bang. We had 3 days when the sailfish were jumping in the boat. One day we caught 6, one day 8 and 4 the next. It doesn’t get much better than that. It tailed off a bit over the past couple days but that’s how sailfishing is… it runs in spurts. We get a huge influx of sailfish for a couple days and they bite like crazy, and then they disappear for a few days. We’re only a few days into sailfish season but this sailfish season looks like it is going to be epic!

Night Anchor Trips 7:30pm

Night anchor trips are catching the highest numbers of fish out of the 3 trips aboard our party fishing boat. Our night anchor trip concentrates on fishing for snappers on the bottom. Lots of yellowtails are biting at night. Mangrove snappers are biting pretty good too. Usually on the full moon of September, the mangroves will spawn and bite extra good. Tomorrow night is the full moon, so we’ll see. A select few muttons are also biting and they’ve been big! The muttons we’re catching this week have averaged 6-12 pounds, which is a bit larger than our average muttons usually are. Sharks are also biting on some nights on our anchor trip. We catch a lot of Atlantic sharpnose sharks, Cuban night sharks, blacktips and nurse. These sharks aren’t the monster gamesharks that we catch on our sportfishing charters, but rather 3-4 ft in length and perfect for a good fight on 30 pound test. Our night anchor trips are catching the most fish by numbers of any of our daily $40 trips.