posted by John on Jul 18
Found tuna fish, could not connect. I saw splashes, but by the time we got there they were down. Blind casting to where we thought they went did not work. I never marked a fish.
It was a highly frustrating day. On top of that the trophy tuna season is closed for me as of tonight at midnight. Recreational permits may no longer target, catch, or keep any fish over 73″. Now I have to go find footballs. It looked like some of the tuna jumping today were small enough. Yesterday we saw a huge bluefin launch itself clear of the water.
If it looks like the tuna are heading in a given direction when you see them, is it a good assumption that they will stay in that direction? I tried that and that did not seem to work either.
posted by John on Jul 16
Anyone who does not believe that a Bluefin Tuna is a powerful fish has never attempted to catch one on light tackle. We cruised all over the place and at 9:50AM we found crashing tuna. It is a sight to behold when a 6-7′ fish launches itself completely out of the water. We saw a huge school of tuna chasing bluefish. One cast into the fray and …….. off to the races. The rod is a Carrot Stix 5’8″ Extra extra heavy jigging rod. The reel is a Shimano Saragossa 18000F. The rod and reel performed well. We worked this fish for about 30 minutes and we had leader out of the water, but the fish ran and ran, and ran right into a lobster pot zone. Nothing we could do to get it away from the pots, then it brilliantly got tangled in a pot buoy and it is really hard to get braid untangled from the bouy line when a fish is on. We tried and failed.
We went back and found a different school farther from the lobster pots. This time we went…….. off to the races again! This rod was a Shimano Trevala TC4f XXH jigging rod, rated to 200lb braid, we only use 80lb. The reel was a Fin-Nor 7500 offshore (I think we melted the drag discs, it was smoking hot). This rig did not perform well. We fought the fish for an hour, Stephen and I had to spell each other. We believed this fish was going to be our yearly trophy fish, until the rod snapped and the top part began a slide towards the fish. In tag team fashion Stephen and I were able to retrieve most of the line and the top part of the pole by hand lining the fish (yes with gloves) and using the pointy end of the boat to cut distance to the fish. It almost worked, we saw color on top about 20 feet from the boat. The last and final run snapped the line on the broken rod.
After the heartbreak, we messed around with the big blues that the tuna were munching. We boated a bunch and headed in.
