Species, Seasons & Tournaments

This section is the engine room. Each piece here sits on top of two datasets we maintain: a species-by-month intensity matrix covering ten gamefish, and a set of species facts where every figure carries its source and, more usefully, its doubts.

The doubts are the point. Fishing content has a bad habit of repeating numbers that no one can trace — the wahoo that does 60 mph, the sailfish that does 68. We went looking. The best instrumented wahoo figure we could find is a tagged fish clocked at 48 mph in a burst, and a peer-reviewed muscle-contraction study puts sailfish physiologically incapable of much over the low thirties. Where our own data is thin, like tarpon, we say it is thin instead of filling the gap with confident prose.

The calendar in one paragraph: wahoo own November to February and they are the reason people come in winter. Blue marlin, sailfish and mahi run the edge roughly March into July. Giant bluefin pass on their return leg from the Gulf of Mexico in late spring, which almost nobody plans around. Yellowtail snapper and grouper hold on the reef year-round, with a hard legal caveat on one of the groupers. Bonefish and permit sit on the flats every month of the year. September and October are hurricane season and the thinnest offshore calendar you will find.

Two things worth knowing before you book anything. Since January 2017 the Bahamas Flats Fishing Regulations make bonefish, permit, tarpon, cobia and snook catch-and-release only on the flats and require an angler licence, which a surprising number of US-facing sites still havent caught up with. And Nassau grouper — the species whose all-tackle world record was set right here — is Critically Endangered and closed nationally from 1 December to 28 February.

Pick a month, then pick a fish, then call someone. The Bimini fishing hubcarries the full matrix and the captains.