Key West Deep Sea Fishing

What is Deep Sea or Offshore Fishing?

Offshore fishing or deep sea fishing, same thing, is done by fishing out in the Atlantic ocean south of Key West. Actually it is done outside the reef line in water depths starting around 100ft out to depths past 2500ft. It gets deeper than that in between Key West and Cuba but most of the fishing is done in that range. So if you book an all day offshore charter you could be fishing anywhere between 6 miles form Key West to over 30 miles from Key West. Most of the boats that fish offshore will do so by trolling.

Trolling allows a boat to cover a large area in search of pelagic fish. Your captain will search for weed lines, anything floating that could hold bait and fish, birds working, temperature breaks, rips, a color change, etc. All of the above can be a great thing to find and potential to hold fish.

Another method used while offshore fishing is live baiting. Live bait fishing is done a little different. You will either anchor over deep water structure over set up and drift in an area that looks productive. You will put the live baits out on one side the upwind side of the boat and use a fishing kite to deploy a couple of bait on the downwind side of the boat. This method can be very productive if you are in a good area. Really the only downfall to this still of fishing is a takes a little time if you need to pull everything in to move to another area. Key West Tuna Fishing

We also fish the offshore waters using a method called running and gunning. All this means is you run until you see something you want to fish. You can then either troll or put out the live baits. If the fish are there you stay if not you pick up and run until find the next spot you would like to fish. Normally the light tackle boats / center console boats would be the ones to fish this way. They are faster and are able to cover a lot of ground running spot to spot.

So you could fish offshore on a smaller light tackle boat or charter a larger offshore trolling boat. The smaller boats cost a little less and are normally faster. The larger trolling boats do cost a little more but some of the advantages are they are much more comfortable when it is rough, some have air conditioning, they can troll more lines at a time and you will have a captain and a mate.