I can officially call my 2026 tuna season done.
Only made it out three times this year, but they ended up being three very different trips. Looking back at them together, I think that's probably a better representation of tuna fishing than if we'd just murdered them three times in a row.
First trip was July 31 out of Garibaldi, and naturally that one gave me a completely unrealistic idea of how the rest of the season was going to go.
We had 26 in the box before noon on a day where, from the radio chatter and talking to people back at the dock, quite a few boats struggled. I still think having flies in the troll spread made a big difference that day.
It was also the first real test for the goofy custom glass 12wt @FlyHunt built for me. 7'6", built off an 8' blank, because I've become convinced that a 9' fly rod on a tuna boat is about 18" longer than it needs to be. That rod accounted for something like 8 of the fish between trolling and actually retrieving flies, and it turned out to be exactly what I'd hoped it would be.
Then, because apparently 26 tuna before lunch wasn't enough fishing, we stopped on the way back in and picked up four sablefish at 800'. With electric reels, because I'm not cranking anything up from 800'. Work smart, not hard.
So that was trip one. Nice ocean, a pile of fish, new rod worked, bonus sablefish. Easy as it gets out there.
Tuna fishing then corrected the record. In more ways than one.
Trip two was August 15 out of the Columbia. Most of the fleet went SW and it was a pretty tough day in the area we were fishing. There were boats around us that blanked entirely. All started on the way there when my rear trailer axle had a U-bolt shear off (ones I replaced the season prior). Thankfully I was 1 mile from a boat launch. It was the John Day boat launch upstream of Astoria, but it was a boat launch. Stayed the night there and launched the next morning with a bit of a longer boat commute than planned. Another stroke of luck - my fishing buddies for this trip have a very good friend that lives about a mile from where this all went down, and he had my tires that got shredded replaced on the rims while we fished.
We managed 9 in the box, but lost another 9. A very frustrating ratio. Tons of dolphins, too. Way more than usual - both the usual fare and Risso's.
We also hooked the one fish from this season that will probably bother me for a long time. It ate one of the heavy trolling setups and just torched me. We had to chase it with the boat and it came close to spooling us a few times. Eventually we got it to somewhere around 50' from the boat, still chasing it, when another boat decided they needed to come over for a closer look, cut us off, and we broke the fish off.
Based on how it fought and everything else we saw, I'm still 90+% convinced it was a striped marlin. Two others were caught in our area that day, and I know one other boat with a confirmed hook-up and seeing the fish before losing it. (actually it was the boat I took my third trip of the season on)
That trip was pretty much the opposite of July. We didn't find the magical pile of suicidal tuna. We scratched fish out, lost a bunch, and came home with enough to call it a successful day while still being annoyed about all the ones that didn't make it into the boat.
Come late Sept/early Oct, I thought that was going to be my season.
Until October 13.
Got an invite to go out on a buddy's boat and obviously wasn't going to say no to an October tuna trip. We were one of only three boats that we knew of working straight off the Columbia that day.
Started cold and pretty slow. Then, like basically every October tuna trip I've taken in the last ten years, things started happening in the afternoon.
The amount of life out there was ridiculous. Probably some of the most bird activity any of us had ever seen offshore, with tuna underneath them and jumpers popping up all over the place.
Naturally, none of those assholes wanted anything we threw at them.
Every fish we caught came on the troll, mostly on small swimbaits. Ended up with 9.
One thing I've noticed on every October trip I've done is that the fish are absolutely stuffed with sauries. They seem to get really keyed in on that smaller profile. Previous years I've done well with small baitfish flies and little jigs. This time they wanted small swimbaits and apparently weren't interested in hearing our suggestions otherwise. They would not touch the flies in the troll spread - only thing in the spread that never got touched even once. No idea how that is given that the profiles were so close to what they were feeding on.
Between that and the afternoon bite, October tuna almost feels like a slightly different fishery.
So, final tally was 44 albacore over three trips.
Not some insane bloodbath season, but I'm pretty damn happy with it.
Probably the biggest takeaway for me is that there really isn't one "best" way to fish for these things. July, flies were a huge part of what made the day work. August was a grind where getting anything in the box felt earned. October, we had tuna jumping under birds all over the damn ocean and couldn't buy a bite casting at them, while little swimbaits dragging around behind the boat quietly did all the work.
I still love jigging for them and, given the choice, I'm probably grabbing a jig rod before anything else. It lets you cover so much more water vertically and horizontally, and firing a jig at jumpers and getting smoked on a high-speed retrieve might be my favorite thing in fishing.
But sometimes they don't give a shit what your favorite way to fish is. That's probably the lesson from this season more than anything. Have options.
We also ran into some legitimately big albacore this year. A few of the 30 lb class fish were absolute donkeys and had me working a hell of a lot harder than a normal tuna does. Those things are no joke.
Anyway, three trips, 44 fish, some sablefish, a bunch of lost tuna, one probable striped marlin that will annoy me forever, and enough different situations that I feel like I learned something on every trip.
Of the many things I learned, my favorite or most profound discovery was probably learning that blue sharks are very, very tasty creatures.
Pretty "ok", not great season. This is by far the fewest trips I've taken in one season.
Now I get several months to look at SST and chlorophyll maps, buy gear I don't need (already started that), make unnecessary modifications to the boat, and convince myself I'll know exactly what I'm doing next year.
Only made it out three times this year, but they ended up being three very different trips. Looking back at them together, I think that's probably a better representation of tuna fishing than if we'd just murdered them three times in a row.
First trip was July 31 out of Garibaldi, and naturally that one gave me a completely unrealistic idea of how the rest of the season was going to go.
We had 26 in the box before noon on a day where, from the radio chatter and talking to people back at the dock, quite a few boats struggled. I still think having flies in the troll spread made a big difference that day.
It was also the first real test for the goofy custom glass 12wt @FlyHunt built for me. 7'6", built off an 8' blank, because I've become convinced that a 9' fly rod on a tuna boat is about 18" longer than it needs to be. That rod accounted for something like 8 of the fish between trolling and actually retrieving flies, and it turned out to be exactly what I'd hoped it would be.
Then, because apparently 26 tuna before lunch wasn't enough fishing, we stopped on the way back in and picked up four sablefish at 800'. With electric reels, because I'm not cranking anything up from 800'. Work smart, not hard.
So that was trip one. Nice ocean, a pile of fish, new rod worked, bonus sablefish. Easy as it gets out there.
Tuna fishing then corrected the record. In more ways than one.
Trip two was August 15 out of the Columbia. Most of the fleet went SW and it was a pretty tough day in the area we were fishing. There were boats around us that blanked entirely. All started on the way there when my rear trailer axle had a U-bolt shear off (ones I replaced the season prior). Thankfully I was 1 mile from a boat launch. It was the John Day boat launch upstream of Astoria, but it was a boat launch. Stayed the night there and launched the next morning with a bit of a longer boat commute than planned. Another stroke of luck - my fishing buddies for this trip have a very good friend that lives about a mile from where this all went down, and he had my tires that got shredded replaced on the rims while we fished.
We managed 9 in the box, but lost another 9. A very frustrating ratio. Tons of dolphins, too. Way more than usual - both the usual fare and Risso's.
We also hooked the one fish from this season that will probably bother me for a long time. It ate one of the heavy trolling setups and just torched me. We had to chase it with the boat and it came close to spooling us a few times. Eventually we got it to somewhere around 50' from the boat, still chasing it, when another boat decided they needed to come over for a closer look, cut us off, and we broke the fish off.
Based on how it fought and everything else we saw, I'm still 90+% convinced it was a striped marlin. Two others were caught in our area that day, and I know one other boat with a confirmed hook-up and seeing the fish before losing it. (actually it was the boat I took my third trip of the season on)
That trip was pretty much the opposite of July. We didn't find the magical pile of suicidal tuna. We scratched fish out, lost a bunch, and came home with enough to call it a successful day while still being annoyed about all the ones that didn't make it into the boat.
Come late Sept/early Oct, I thought that was going to be my season.
Until October 13.
Got an invite to go out on a buddy's boat and obviously wasn't going to say no to an October tuna trip. We were one of only three boats that we knew of working straight off the Columbia that day.
Started cold and pretty slow. Then, like basically every October tuna trip I've taken in the last ten years, things started happening in the afternoon.
The amount of life out there was ridiculous. Probably some of the most bird activity any of us had ever seen offshore, with tuna underneath them and jumpers popping up all over the place.
Naturally, none of those assholes wanted anything we threw at them.
Every fish we caught came on the troll, mostly on small swimbaits. Ended up with 9.
One thing I've noticed on every October trip I've done is that the fish are absolutely stuffed with sauries. They seem to get really keyed in on that smaller profile. Previous years I've done well with small baitfish flies and little jigs. This time they wanted small swimbaits and apparently weren't interested in hearing our suggestions otherwise. They would not touch the flies in the troll spread - only thing in the spread that never got touched even once. No idea how that is given that the profiles were so close to what they were feeding on.
Between that and the afternoon bite, October tuna almost feels like a slightly different fishery.
So, final tally was 44 albacore over three trips.
Not some insane bloodbath season, but I'm pretty damn happy with it.
Probably the biggest takeaway for me is that there really isn't one "best" way to fish for these things. July, flies were a huge part of what made the day work. August was a grind where getting anything in the box felt earned. October, we had tuna jumping under birds all over the damn ocean and couldn't buy a bite casting at them, while little swimbaits dragging around behind the boat quietly did all the work.
I still love jigging for them and, given the choice, I'm probably grabbing a jig rod before anything else. It lets you cover so much more water vertically and horizontally, and firing a jig at jumpers and getting smoked on a high-speed retrieve might be my favorite thing in fishing.
But sometimes they don't give a shit what your favorite way to fish is. That's probably the lesson from this season more than anything. Have options.
We also ran into some legitimately big albacore this year. A few of the 30 lb class fish were absolute donkeys and had me working a hell of a lot harder than a normal tuna does. Those things are no joke.
Anyway, three trips, 44 fish, some sablefish, a bunch of lost tuna, one probable striped marlin that will annoy me forever, and enough different situations that I feel like I learned something on every trip.
Of the many things I learned, my favorite or most profound discovery was probably learning that blue sharks are very, very tasty creatures.
Pretty "ok", not great season. This is by far the fewest trips I've taken in one season.
Now I get several months to look at SST and chlorophyll maps, buy gear I don't need (already started that), make unnecessary modifications to the boat, and convince myself I'll know exactly what I'm doing next year.
