We fished the exact same lumps where we fished on our last trip but with even better results on today’s trip. I was very confidant the bite would be really good on today’s trip with the reduced boat traffic compared to the July 4th holiday weekend and it was. I did not keep the exact numbers of how many bites we had but we released at least 6 large ones and had steady action from the first 10 minutes we put our spread out. We boated a 133 lb. Bluefin that our charter customers weighed in at South Jersey Marina and it was the largest so far of the 2013 season weighed in at the Marina. Pretty decent fish and it reminded me of past years when we had world class BFT fishing out of Cape May with some scallop boat tuna over 200 lbs. Everything was caught on the troll today and for what it is worth, the sea conditions were pretty snotty on the way out in the dark as we left at 1:30 am. We know of a couple of boats that stopped short as running into the head seas was not a lot of fun even in our big boat. There was a good number of Bluefins and along with some Yellowfins caught today on quite a few different 20 and 30 fathom lumps so there are a lot of choices on where to fish.
What made today even more special is we had US Coast Guard Rescue swimmer, John Brennen from Nantucket, MA on the trip who just returned recently from being stationed in Alaska for 2 years and it was John who fought the 133 lb. BFT today and is the angler of record. We also had one of my past customers Richard Laplante from Montreal, Canada with us and he was able to test his angling skills on at least 2-3 tuna that were around 55-60 inches that we released. We have now released over 20 Bluefins this past week and everyone of them were at least 60-70 lbs plus and a few well over 100 lbs On today’s trip we had multiple hook ups on a few different occasions so now is the time to get out if you want a chance to do battle with 100 lb plus tuna with a boat ride under 2 hours. Most our tuna are coming from the wwwwwwback lines but others boats are doing really good fishing the deep lines on planners so there are various options on how to fish for these inshore tuna. We actually took our planner out of the water this morning as we were getting all surface bites.
We are open this coming Saturday for either an open boat trip for up to 6 anglers or regular charter. We are also available to run down to the Washington Canyon targeting Big Eyes and Yellowfins on our 24 and 30 hour overnight trips. One my friends was down there the last few days and had 4 Big Eyes as the Washington is the canyon of choice at the present time for deepwater tuna from all the reports I am getting.
