We set out today with a goal in mind…to catch 14 year old Jack Rodberg his first tuna! Well, we succeeded and Jack and his father Derek were excited. The two chartered the whole boat for themselves and came all the way from Islamorada, Florida! Not only did we catch a nice 70 lb. yellowfin, but we also caught a 131 lb big eye tuna!!
The bite was slow in the morning but came on around 1:30 pm with most boats hooking up 60-70 lb. yellowfins and big eyes in a local southern canyon.
Over the last 2 days of canyon fishing we caught 4 nice 70 lb. range yellowfins, one bluefin, 5 makos under 100 lbs. that were all released, a swordfish and 7 mahi. We fished various southern canyons this week along with spending some time on the inshore bluefin grounds but most of our trips have been in the deep canyons recently.
Our next open dates are in early August.
It has been a much different 2014 offshore season for us so far this year compared to last summer at this time fishing almost exclusively in the Washington Canyon. The offshore tuna bite has been hit or miss. It is said fish move all the time that could not be truer so far this year.
We have seen days when boats catch up to 20-30 nice size Yellowfins and two days later the same boats catch 2-3 tuna, fishing the exact location. When it is good it is on fire and literally overnight the canyon tuna bite becomes almost nonexistent for the most part especially on the night chunk.
This is not so true when targeting inshore Bluefin’s as the action has been pretty good the last few weeks but we are still not seeing the good numbers of 60-65 inch tuna we have seen in past years locally. Last summer we could hardly find a fish under 47 inches on most of our inshore Bluefin’s trips as most of the ones we caught or released were in the 90-150 lb. class all summer.
On yesterday’s trip we struggled most of the morning as did almost every boat fishing by us except for probably the best White Marlin bite in any canyon so far this season. If you put out a spread to specially to target Whites you could have had a banner day but the tuna fishing was very slow until early afternoon when it went off big time.
The day before the tuna bite caught on fire about 5:00 pm with some decent catches of 75 lb. Yellowfins and Big Eyes into the night. It was not just one canyon that this happened either as there is some good tuna fishing on the troll in a couple of canyons late in the day and at daybreak.
This is why doing overnight trips really adds to your chances of putting a good catch together due to being on the tuna grounds with less boat traffic and when the tuna feed especially the Big Eyes. Yesterday it came on early in the day which helped us catch our Yellowfin and Big Eye but it still ended up being a 15 hour day troll trip for us.
