I figured I'd post up some more details from my trip yesterday on a private boat with a great crew and skipper--a mixed gear trip where I'd be the only one flinging flies this particular day. So for starting out, we had some intel from a couple places based on where a good bite was the previous day. It was around 40 miles from port and that's where we started, along with most of the rest of the fleet it seemed. We spent maybe an hour there trolling X-raps, clones and one fly. We were not seeing tuna and not liking the water color very much, and everyone else just appeared to keep trolling too which is not usually a good sign, when we finally saw some active birds and nervous water. We thought it might be a school of mackerel because it was not tuna, and tossed small and med-large live anchovies and a fly at the school, and nary a bite, we decided to stop screwing around, wasting time and go find fish and/or better water. Well, truly the skipper made that call. It was a good call.
Based on a few-day-old image (but I think the latest we could get from the Tuna Fishers NVS app?) we headed northwest a long long way and started to look around. Water looked a bit better (although we never did fish the true blue water as shown in Phil's pic above, skipper called it gray-blue but I wasn't sure how much of that was influenced by cloud cover, but it sure didn't look the color of Phil's pic), and we saw some active birds and started trolling. Within minutes we hooked up on an X-Rap and were able to get another fish on bait. A fish was lost, I forget why. We lost a lot of fish to various reasons and at this point they all kind of blend together. Reasons include overly tight drags, fish going under the boat and cutting the line on the bottom, fish just coming off for some frigging unknown reason, etc. That bite died and we picked up and trolled and soon hooked a fish on a clone, and then converted on the bait stop again. This pattern more or less continued for the day as we began really loading up on fish (and messing up a lot of gear that had to be quickly re-rigged). This is where having a great skipper and crew come in. There were six of us on board which is a lot of big dudes on a not enormous space after the giant cooler, quickly-filling kill bags, and bait live well. So it worked great to have people able to fill all the needed roles at the right time, whether that be heading and gutting fish, cleaning up, re-rigging gear, chumming, or actually fishing (and gaffing) while the bite is going. There's a lot going on.
Anyway, when we had a decent number of fish on board I started climbing to the bow more often to cast and strip flies. I was very happy with my new SA Titan Sonar Big Water Taper 600s line, which I picked up online for a nice discount. I was throwing that with a well-loved Sage Xi2 12 wt and getting 80 foot casts pretty reliably without any real issues, which puts you nicely in the right zone for this fishery. It helped that the ocean was nice, real nice. But, I wasn't getting bit when I was trolling a fly or casting from the front. I cycled through more flies on this trip than I think I ever have on a single tuna trip. In this case, I tried 4 patterns for the day, starting with one of my own and then going through fly swap flies from a swap from the former place.
Eventually we stopped trolling because 1) we were running low on bait/chum and 2) we didn't need to. We found that we were able to move to active fish/birds, slide in on 'em, throw sh*t at 'em, hook up and convert on various gear. Doing this from the bow with a swim bait is very fun my friends, very fun. I got a visual eat right in front of me on a swim bait that is burned in my brain up there with other tuna fly eats. Just....WHAM! Shake Shake Shake ZZZZZiiing! And, eventually persistence did pay off and I hooked a tuna on a swap fly tied by
@jasmillo, casting it out of the bow, letting it sink for sec, then stripping it back. A two-handed strip in this case, which I've had a decent amount of success with for tuna now. I did not see the eat, but boy did I feel it! We landed that fish. It was a tussle and the deck was so busy with hooked fish in a cluster that I went over the roof, hopped onto the cooler and down, all while hooked up, in order to reach a viable gaff man on the other side from the cluster. Good sh*t. I'm smiling thinking about it. As the day grew older, some organized swells and light breeze chop developed on our chunk of the ocean; we were the only boat around and the radio was silent. At some point we looked at the time and our distance from port (64 miles back to to the bar!) and realized we needed to stop. We figured we were in the high twenties, low thirties on fish, which ended up being about right--we had 35. Skipper said the boat was riding super heavy back in. It was a pretty nice ride until close to home where a wind and the seas picked up a bit but what a day. What. A. Day.
Let's see, other things-- also saw porpoises, many mola mola, 3 humpback whales, a few blue sharks but not too many, several black-footed albatross and I believe petrels and shearwaters. Still not sure what that school of smaller fish were.
All stomach contents of tuna I saw were full of very small bait (like 1.5"), smaller than any flies we ever would think to use for tuna, or our anchovies. Oh yeah our two scoops of anchovies included at least one surf smelt, quite a few herring, and at least one Chinook(!).
One last thought--I think it really makes a ton of sense to have people fishing and/or able to fish all kinds of gear in this fishery, in order to maximize opportunity and the big investment in just getting out there and being ready to fish tuna. But, if 3 or 4 guys want to be able to cast flies at every stop, it makes it a lot harder due to needing to clear lines and put the rods down so people can fly cast off the deck at all. Something to think about for future charters and how bad people want to catch a tuna on a fly, and in what manner, versus get some groceries. It's nice to have a balance and I suspect the only way to make it feel truly balanced is to have a bunch of biting fish available.
Flies used (bottom fly by
@jasmillo caught a fish) :
.
