What's your secret to catching large tuna instead of footballs?

[vbmlows]

For the purposes of this thread, 50 lbs separates footballs from "large" tuna. I know 50 may seem like a small tuna to many of you, but I am just wondering how the pros on this forum avoid the dinks.

[XpatBubba]

I assume you are talking about yellowfin. Try trolling lipped divers WAAAYYY back. Works well to get bigger blackfins

[Bwana Bill]

bigger bait/lures?..........

my PB YFT sucked down a whole live blackfin

[Captain Fred Archer]

Made my living catching yellowfin for a lot of years. Our biggest problem down in Cabo was an abundance of tunas and restrictive limits of only 5 for the boat a day. The fish bit well on the many good days...too well, believe it or not. We didn't want to slaughter bunches of schoolies and miss out on the cows. Plus, we knew that X number of the schooly fish would be bleeders that wouldn't make it.

So we bait & switched the heck out of the tunas and everything else. That let us pick and choose exactly which tunas, marlin, dolphins (there was also a very restrictive limit on them and we only wanted the big bulls), wahoos, or whatever we wanted to catch by pitching a bait on the appropriate gear for that fish. So, if a blue came to the teasers, we put the right sized gear and pitch bait out for him. Ditto on the cows. This also allowed us to put light gear out on any smaller fish that showed up that our clients wanted to catch.

And when it came to the tunas, cow yellowfin feed on both very small baits at times, and they feed on big baits, like smaller tunas, skipjacks, etc. So what happened many times was, we'd have a bunch of these smaller fish going insane on the teasers and some big cowmungusses would see that and come up for them. The smaller fish would scatter and just about every time the cows would check out the teasers and we'd get a great shot at them, again, on the right gear.

I know that bait & switch fishing isn't common back there and until you've done it, it seems complicated and it's kind of scary to fish without hooks in the water, but it is actually very simple and is a great way to catch tons of fish...but only the ones that you want to catch. It turned out to be our absolute favorite way to fish and man, we piled up a helluva lot of fish doing it!

[WahooKing]

We catch the bigger YF within the schools with big live baits (Goggle Eye or Blue Runner) down deep....Also, hauled some big ones off bonita type lures.

[Captain Fred Archer]

There is some logical merit in running big lures long with the assumption, I suppose, that big tunas and blue ones often come in from back thataway to attack smaller tunas in front of them, or to see what that fascinating wake is all about, but then again, the smaller units often come up to the spread from way back too. I watched them do that many times from my tuna tower. This usually allowed me or one of my crew to the alert the folks down in the 'pit that "they're coming! Tuna (or fill-in-the-blank) coming!" Same with most other species. The tuna tower was the biggest key to that and seeing the fish coming before they actually got there was and is one of the reasons why I love the T towers and would never fish pelagics without one.

And the fact is, a forty or fifty pound tuna will often hit a mighty big lure, as will many other "nuisance fish", like dolphin, wahoos and so on. So if the objective is (and it was for us much of the time) not to keep catching the schoolies and those other fish (this was often the case when we had clients who were interested in billfish only and also cows only) from getting hooked up, all that we accomplished by running bigger lures way back was not only hooking more than a few fish that we weren't interested in in the first place, but only hooking one or two at a time and doing so a long, time-wasting "wind" from the boat. Do that with some serious marlin guys aboard and you'll soon be getting the stinkeye every time that happens!

Sure, some of the time it was a blue or a black that popped up back there, but the majority of the time it was fish that our people didn't want to catch, let alone waste time cranking them in from way back there. And so, bait & switch fishing became and remained our favorite way of catching what we wanted to catch and not catching what we didn't, especially when it came to billfish, but cow yellowfin too.

I am addressing trolling only here, not the other ways that work well for catching the cows in particular. I will say that for them, something that I haven't read about here yet and that is a great way of catching the deep ones is an old Northeast trick that I learned long ago...deep jigging a Drone Spoon. That was done by simply sliding a big egg sinker on the leader in front of the spoon and letting it drop down and jigging it. So simple, yet it works very well.

As far as the bonito type plugs are concerned, yes, they surely do catch tunas, but the problem as I see it is that, just as it is with most armed lures, they catch little ones as well as big ones, so I don't see them as an answer to zeroing in on the big tunas and the big marlins too.

So for me, bait & switching remains the best way of actually selecting what you want to catch and not the stuff that you don't. And in the final analysis, nothing else that we did, except baiting a daytime swordfish, was anywhere near as exciting for our clients than seeing fish going bananas over teasers right in front of their eyes...and those "sight bites" blew their minds too.

It is one of those things that most folks are naturally leery about doing, so they don't...and the inevitable happens...or I suppose I should say, doesn't happen. Oh well.

[vbmlows]

Thanks for the responses guys. This forum rocks!

[wide open]

We catch the bigger YF within the schools with big live baits (Goggle Eye or Blue Runner) down deep....Also, hauled some big ones off bonita type lures.

that is the ticket down south good call

[zar2754]

bring your troll speed back...slow down ...

[hubris 1]

I cant keep a secret........If I knew I would tell you. I say its just like real estate.......Location, Location, Location. Everything else is wrong.