This is going to be a short post, because I don't want to sound repetitive. Also, I'm starving and about to eat dinner!
Anyways, we were able to squeeze in a giant tuna trip yesterday. I went straight from a Cape Cod striped bass fishing adventure into a late night pogie catching and all day giant tuna fishing marathon. Bottom line is that myself, and the crew, stayed awake for about 40 hours. Needless to say we all slept soundly last night.
I'm not sure if we are starting to become half-way decent pogie fishermen, or are just extremely lucky, but we absolutely loaded up on pogies Tuesday night. In short order we had close to 50 adult menhaden swimming in our live-well. It's a great feeling knowing you are heading to the tuna grounds with live bait.
There's been a solid tuna bite happening in Cape Cod Bay, just off Provincetown as of late. We decided to join the fleet, and it was not long until we heard some positive reports over the radio. Just as we began setting our baits, a pod of giants surfaced off our bow. There were some awfully big fish around yesterday.
A few hours into fishing we had a take on one of our balloon baits. The pogie we had set at 50 feet got destroyed and line started screaming off the Penn 80! We cleared lines and started the engine as the rod doubled over, the fish peeling line the entire time. I hopped on the rod with hopes of bringing our first tuna of the fall to the boat.
Unfortunately we soon realized that we had not hooked a tuna, but another giant blue shark. I could have sworn we had a bluefin on the line based on the initial run. Apparently this shark had a bit more gusto and fight in him than the 10 footer we tied into last week.
It was a bit of bummer, but at least we had a fish on the line. For now we will take what we can get!
We reset our lines after the shark and continued fishing until 4:30pm. Numerous tuna were caught yesterday, including one that was reportedly 110 inches. I'd imagine that fish weighed in at around 700 pounds.
All in all it was a great trip with flat calm conditions and sunny skies. I'm very happy with our pogie performance. If we don't catch a giant tuna this year, at least we learned how to catch pogies.
I'm hoping to get out tuna fishing again this weekend-maybe I'll have something other than sharks to report on.
Until then tight lines, good luck fishing and go get em!
Ryan
