8/10/15 Early August Offshore fishing report

The crowds are finally thinning out here a little at Bud n' Mary's. It's a nice change of pace, especially for fishing since the waters won't be nearly as crowded the next few months. The winds have been very calm the last few days while offshore fishing in Islamorada. Over the past 10 days mahi have still been the main target for the boats. Most of the days were pretty active, but there was a couple slower days lately with the extremely nice weather. A lot of times a little bit of wind helps "the bite". Overall the boats on full day charters have been averaging 10 - 30 fish, the majority of the fish are schoolies in the 3 - 5 lb range, a handful of medium size fish from 7 - 12 lbs, and there's been some slammers on the dock each day from 20 - 30 lbs. The last couple days in particular we have had lots of big schools of fish, with keeper  "schoolies" and undersize "shakers" mixed together. The "shakers" are undersize mahi which we shake off next to the boat. Sometimes you have to catch 30 or 40 fish just to keep a handful of legal fish. I think the boats will still keep catching mahi in good numbers the rest of the month, but you may just have to be patient go through a lot of fish to put some meat in the box. The blackfin tuna have been showing up in better numbers on the humps, with fish from 3 - 20 lbs. The fall months have been very good for blackfin tunas the last couple years, so I imagine we'll see plenty of tuna here the next couple months.

A few boats have been fishing the reef, but remember it's extremely hot out and with little wind it's hard to spend much more than a 1/2 day on the anchor fishing the reef comfortably. The mangrove snapper bite has been very good and there's still some yellowtails in the mix.

Way offshore I've been doing some daytime swordfishing lately. We had some bad luck losing fish on few trips, and one trip without a bite, but the good news is the last 3 trips we caught fish, including a monsterous 335 lber and one trip produced 4 fish! We tagged and released 3 of them. The fall is a great time to target swordfish and we have a handful of boats here all rigged and ready. If you want to take a gamble and try to catch a fish you'll always remember, consider swordfishing this time of year. Give the marina office a call to set up any fishing trip you want to do at 305 664 2461!

Capt. Nick Stanczyk