Miami Fishing Report - July 26

[Captain Dean Panos]

I’m glad to report that the fishing on the edge in Miami has been pretty good. There has definitely been a lot of action. Although bonitas are not good table fare, they are excellent fighting fish and are great to take up the time while waiting for a kingfish or sailfish to show up. The bonitas have been thick in the reef. Yesterday we saw acres of them busting small minnows in about 200 feet of water. Needless to say, we were fighting bonitas until our arms were sore.

Besides bonitas, we have been catching kingfish on every trip. The kingfish have varied in depth from as shallow as 90 feet all the way out to 220 feet. Some of the kings have been of decent size (close to 30 pounds). We have also caught a sailfish here and there. It seems like every other trip or so we manage to catch a sailfish and those odds should soon start getting better too.

There have also been quite a few sharks on the reef and we have caught more than our share. Besides those species, you just never know what you’re going to catch this time of year. To the north there has been a decent wahoo bite. Down here we have also had a good mutton snapper bite. I haven’t caught any of them, I also haven’t really tried, but I see them coming in to the cleaning station almost daily.

We also saw three of the main billfish species yesterday. Mind you we saw and not caught, but in 150 feet of water just 50 yards from our bow, we saw a solid 100 pound swordfish free jumping during the day. About a half hour later, way out on the horizon, we saw a blue marlin free jumping, and following that we saw a sailfish free jumping. Now, don’t you think the abundance of bonitas has something to do with this?

We also had two more swordfish trips from our last report and were quite lucky in those trips as we caught three swordfish on each of those nights. These fish were more typical of our summer stock of 40 – 80 pound fish and were not the big fish we caught two weeks ago.

That’s it for now, we are going to Bimini tomorrow (our last two trips got cancelled there) and have a few swordfish trips lined up after that.

I mentioned it in my past fishing reports, but there are two other tournaments in August that I am open for and would love to fish them. The first is the Swordlords Tournament on August 13th and the Dusk to Dawn Tournament on August 27th. The Dusk to Dawn tournament is a new tournament. It has a good cause as it is meant to help A Child is Missing Organization. If anyone is interested, please give me a call and we can discuss.

Tight Lines,
Capt. Dean Panos

[FinalPoint]

Nice report Dean and congrats on the success (especially with the 310 and 238 or whatever they weighed). I once saw a 200+ lb sword in 120 ft. of water during the winter time...unbelievable at first, but it jumped at least 5 times.