Montauk Pioneer - August 8, 2008

Thanks to some beautiful weather over the weekend, I was finally able to make a trip out tuna fishing. I was invited to go out on the "Rebel," a 33 Grady White center console. Our crew this week was the owners, Mike Tucci and Doug Wells.

We left the dock at 3:15 a.m. on Saturday morning to ensure that we would be ready to troll by daybreak. The ride out was perfect, the ocean was like glass, and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. We decided we were going to head out to the dip. The dip is between the Block Canyon and the Hudson Canyon, and it has been hot lately. We were able to really cruise on the way out thanks to the calm ocean and the night vision camera. When we arrived just north of the dip after about a 2 hour ride, we weren't alone. There were already a group of boats trolling this area pretty hard.

There seemed to be a lot of action in this spot, the boats were working it pretty hard, and there seemed be a lot of skipjacks breaking all over the surface. Hoping that there would be some yellowfin mixed in with these skippies, we trolled through breaking fish. Within minutes of setting out our lines, we had knockdowns on 3 rods. They all seemed to be small, and we brought them in. We brought in the first two and they were small skipjacks, but the last one was a keeper yellow. We threw it in the box and went back to trolling.

There were yellowfin with these fish, but they were all really small as well. It was tough to find the bigger ones in these schools. We trolled this area and got two yellowfin in the box. There were a lot of skipjacks in this spot, almost too many to where it became a nuisance to try and get through them to get to the yellowfin.

We left that area and started to troll a little deeper and more west, looking for some bigger fish. We found some more small skipjacks, and another small yellowfin. We were on the hunt for the bigger tuna, so we left that spot and headed back towards the dip, and out towards the edge. On our troll back to the dip we spotted a billfish on the surface. We trolled past it a few times, but it wasn't interested. Our deep line actually went right over him, and nothing, he didn't even think about going for it. We thought it was a blue marlin, but now that I think about it, the fin was a little too rounded on the top, and I believe it was a broadbill swordfish. That also will explain why he wasn't really interested in our baits, if we threw him a squid I bet he would have taken the bait. He didn't want to go after us, he was up on the surface basking in the sun. A few minutes later another fin on the surface, this time it was a blue marlin, but again, it didn't want to feed, he went down and we didn't see him again.

We decided to pick up around 11:30 a.m. and run east to the Middle Grounds. After about a 15-minute run we arrived at the Middle Grounds, where there were a bunch of boats trolling on deep side. We heard a lot of chatter on the radio about a bunch of big eyes caught, one up to 300 lbs. We trolled this area for a while, a few boats next to us got lucky. We watched one boat fight a big fish for almost a half hour, we didn't see him land it, but it seemed like they had a nice size big-eye or yellowfin on. A few minutes later we heard a captain right near us talking about being hooked up on a very large blue marlin. As he said this we saw a 400+ blue marlin fly out of the water from behind one of the big sportfishers stern. They ended up loosing it due to tackle failures, but what a great hookup either way.

We stayed trolling until around 2:30 p.m. and decided to head back to the barn. There is plenty of action out there, it just seems to be real spread out. Make sure you get to them early though, that way you know that nobody has hit that spot already and taken all the good sized fish.

As for the big blue marlin, maybe next time. Next weekend I will be out by the Lighthouse trying to catch some 30-50 pound cows. Until then......TIGHT LINES!