160 lb Bluefin and 7 Yellowfins on the Hooked Up II today

2009-08-06

We had Mike Daley from Daley Plastering Delaware Valley, PA out for the second time this week to do some inshore fishing. Earlier this week Mike and his son went out on a farther son tuna outing and we put them on the nice BFT in the 160 lb range. On today’s trip it was more of a company outing with some of his people from his office joining us. Well what a day it turned out to be.
We arrived at the SECRET SPOT with reports of a awesome jig bite yesterday by a fellow captain that fished there yesterday and went to the general location but found absolutely no life there. We had fished almost the exact location on Tuesday and did well but for some reason the tuna and bait moved off this spot and there was no reason to put a line in when we saw absolutely nothing on my fish finder so we ran a few miles to where we had fished on Sunday and Monday and there they were from 70 feet to the bottom and they were thick. We called and told my fellow captain that it took us less than 30 seconds to get hooked up to a BFT with a Sardine 5 cranks off the bottom with 24 oz of weight 25 feet above the hook. We only used 130 lb leader today and I think we had 5 bites all on the heavy leader. It was so good we were getting bites as we slowly dropped the Sardine and we had a few come back totally crushed but the tuna missed the hook. It really was great BFT fishing and at least part of the time we at 1½ mile away from any other boat. We boated a 160 lb BFT and released one of similar size and we now are strongly suggesting to our charters to leave the Secret Spot and go look for other species trolling verse doing catch and release on BFT and the last two trips that is exactly what we did.
Well on today it really paid off for us. We headed to the Southeast from where we were BFT fishing when I saw some whales and slick everywhere just over the 30 fathom line on a temp break that went from 79.9 to 79.1. Not much of a break but with the whales and slicks it seemed worth a shot so we decided to put in our light tackle inshore trolling spread which was identical to the one we used trolling inside the 30 line on Tuesday’s trip after boating our legal BFT. We also added a deep running Wahoo lure rigged on a 4 lb Cigar weight similar to how Wahoo are fished in the Bahamas in the spring. Well it did not take long before the same lure that worked so well for us on Tuesday’s trip started producing today and was nothing more than an all Pink Carolina Sea Witch with a medium Ballyhoo rigged behind it. It was deadly today and nothing in our spread got touched except the pink Sea Witch. Go figure as it seems small Yellowfins must love this color at least where we fished the last few days. We only trolled about one hour and our charter said let’s call it a day and in that hour we boated 7 Yellowfins most barely legal but a couple of bigger ones and the largest was 53 lbs. Honestly everyone on board was thrilled to see a inshore Yellowfin bite regardless of the size and hoping this bodes well on Yellowfins in the coming weeks. I recognize these are not the size Yellowfins most of us have been used to over the year but it sure beats what we caught last year almost anywhere we fished in early August especially when we were never more than 65 miles from our home port in Cape May. Yellowfins and Bluefins on the same trip kind of reminds of the old Hog Dog and Muff Diver days when we used to chunk them both during the day and those days are stilled talked about by the lucky ones that got in on that bite. Best of luck to all and now off to bed.
Just a great fun filled day today chunking and trolling for tuna. We hope to see the tuna bite only get better from now on and being able to catch a nice size BFT and a few Yellowfins on the same day trip is not all that bad.

Pictures from today's trip


I bet know one can guess which one is the Bluefin. I almost forgot what a 50 lb Yellowfin looked like after last season