Reports
- 160 lb Bluefin and 7 Yellowfins on the Hooked Up II today
- Tuna Fishing Report for August 1st-5th
- Outfished by Center Consoles But Still a Great Day
- Blue Fin Tuna Fishing Report
- Updated report on the Hooked UP II
- Tuna report on the Hooked Up II
- 25 Yellowfin, TRIED for Bluefin, Marlin-Big Eye on 55 Hooked Up II
- A very detailed report on new world class jigging-popping tackle on the 55 Hooked Up II
- My thoughts on spinners versus conventionals for jigging those 80-175 lb. Bluefins
- August 24, 2008 Report for the past few days.
7/31/2008 Carl Elliot Clean Earth Charter Report
2008-07-31
I haven't had time to write any kind of report the past few days as we have fishing almost every day the last week doing regular charters with a few make-up trips thrown in. Good, bad, ugly and great is how the trips eventually turned out for us depending on which day we fished. We have experienced the skunk with up to 9 bites and lost every fish to boating a fish early am and releasing a good number over 100 lbs and up. Quite honestly we have seen it all lately with at times being the red hot boat and other times not being able to get a bite with boats around us all on tuna. One of the problems we had getting bites was I resisted changing my tactics when jigging and chunking from past years and going to super light 30 lb fluorocarbon leaders on our chunk baits. Last year we never chunked and had a great, great year trolling until the overnight canyon season started on yellowfins. This year the best tuna fishing has been chunking and jigging so far and we had to adjust. The main problem that we had to eliminate was the heavy top shots of mono on all our reels as they have 80-130 lb Jerry Brown Hollow Core Spectra with 50-100 feet of heavy mono top shots between 80-100 lbs. This works great when canyon fishing for big eyes, swords, wahoo and the bigger yellowfins at night but is not good for leader shy bluefin chunking in the day time even though we add 8- 15 feet of light fluorocarbon leader to the top shot with a small swivel that easily fits through our big foot guides. The heavier mono is just too visible in the clear water we have been fishing and the only time this works is right before daybreak with low light conditions. We started using our lighter older TLD 30’s and other reels with 40-50 lb mono only with 15 feet of fluorocarbon leaders in the 30-40 lb class and the bites became non-stop at times but when things get slow with lots of boats, it is difficult to get any bite no matter what we put out short of using live bait. We even went down to 25 long floro leaders on one trip and they got bit right away but all we got back during the tuna’s initial run was a broken leader even though we had practically no drag on the reels. I absolutely hate fishing this way as we end up fighting these bigger tuna for up to and over 2 hours and then breaking them off. We fought a very nice one on Tuesday’s trip for almost 2 hours before the leader parted with no more than 12-15 lbs of drag. The one saving grace has been that the heavy fog has kept the fleet down and it has been very good fishing with lots of action. We even got away with all 60 lb leader yesterday morning early am when there was only one other boat out by us when the sun came up and we had no trouble boating and releasing a few tuna in the 58-60 inch range. We marked them good before the other boats showed up. We are now leaving at 1:00 am to be on the tuna grounds and fishing before the fleet. We have been moving around a lot to lumps and high spots with steep drop-offs hoping to find a few tuna sometimes one mile from the fleet and other times up to five miles which works occasionally but not all the time.