The Southbound had a late afternoon trip today.
From 2 pm until 6 pm. My customers did not want to fish the reef. they wanted bigger fish. Specifically, they wanted a fish bigger than they could catch in Lake Erie. On a late trip such as this, I thought our best bet was to fish for Black Fin Tuna. Pound for pound a very strong powerful fish. They fight “bigger” than their size and they can be over 30 lbs. It is not an easy fish to bring in. I had heard the Black Fin Tuna had been biting late in the day. It is not uncommon for there to be a sunset bite with them. you can drive around marking them on the bottom machine without getting a strike, then just before or as the sun is setting, you get bites.
I was hoping they would bite earlier,
waiting until the last minute to catch a fish can be a bit stressful. Mainly because the Sunset bite doesn’t always happen. You can’t trust a Tuna. We trolled around outside the reef in water between 115 and 305 ft deep. it looked good. There was blue water, east current, and a nice color change, but we were just not getting any bites. Another boat captain called me as we were headed in and told me he hooked a couple of tuna right on the edge of the outer bar. 115 ft of water. He was actually right where I had been earlier, only the tuna were not biting when I was there. I decided to make a quick “overtime” stop and give it 15 minutes to see if we could catch one.
We put our lines out and immediately got a couple of bites, which we missed. We put them back out and a couple of fo Black Fin tuna crashed the bates as soon as they hit the water. The sun was going down, we were out of time, actually on over time, but we ended up with 2 nice Black Fin Tuna right at the “Buzzer”. Thank goodness for the Sunset Bite
Black Fin are not a big Tuna
as I mentioned, they can get up to 30 lbs but that is not big compared to some of the other tuna species. They are delicious eating. Great cooked or for fresh sushi. Her is a good recipe for Black Fin tuna