Texas springtime yellowfin tuna
Yellowfin tuna fishing the Texas coast in the spring time can be like an episode of “The Deadliest Catch” if you happen to be out there when one of the spring northers comes through. Passing cold fronts that pack 40 mph winds are, without a doubt, days to stay on land and sharpen your hooks. I can assure you that the comfort level of being caught offshore during one of these fronts is very low! However, with the right weather window, I easily make numerous and very successful trips each spring to the Spars BoomVang, Nancen or Hoover.
At 115 to 125 nautical miles, you need to do your homework ahead of time, especially in the spring. There are many forecasting tools online, and I use data from several of them to formulate my plan. Buoy weather, Hilton’s Real-Time Navigator, Texas-Offshore’s Reefcaster and NOAA are a few of them. The cold fronts can be your best friend or worst enemy. It is just a matter of timing and being able to go on short notice in between the cold fronts. When the fronts push through, we generally have 18 hours of northeast wind that rough up the Gulf of Mexico. But as the wind begins to lie, the seas start to calm down, and then we get some high-pressure days following.
I run my spring offshore trips on the post-cold-front, high-pressure days as much as possible, particularly when I am running to the Spars. I run a 36-foot Yellowfin center console so being caught in nasty weather or getting hit by a front is not something I plan to do. Long range trips to BoomVang, Nancen, and Hoover can yield big catches of yellowfin tuna, blackfin tuna, wahoo, mako sharks, dorado and billfish. I recently saw a little window after a front and called up some of my hard-core tuna fishing friends to let them know what I was thinking. Leaving Jan. 25 and coming back Jan. 26 was looking really good for a tuna trip.
We left Port O’Connor at noon on Monday and had the spread out trolling BoomVang at 3 p.m. We quickly hooked up on a 40-pound yellowfin tuna on the right flat, soon after yellowfin tuna were skying out of the water chasing flying fish and other baitfish. We pulled in the lures and started throwing topwaters on spinning gear spooled with 65-pound braid. By dark we had five yellowfin in the box. Four of the tuna came on topwater poppers. And if, by chance, you haven’t seen a yellowfin tuna hit a topwater, it is one of the most vicious strikes on the planet. We caught nine more through the night and into the next morning by chunking and jigging, boating 14 yellowfin tuna from 30 to 90 pounds.
Many techniques are used for catching yellowfin tuna. Throwing topwater baits is certainly one of the most entertaining. A 6- or 7-foot spinning rod that will launch a 4- to 5-ounce lure and still have some backbone is the ticket. A spinning reel that will hold 400 to 600 yards of 65- to 80-pound braided line is a perfect match. An Ocean Tackle International Komodo or Wombat Popper comes rigged with extra-strong hooks and oversized split rings and needs no further modifications to handle strong tuna. I will tie a 100-pound ball bearing swivel to the mainline using a double Palomar. Then, using a San Diego jam knot, I attach a 3-foot fluorocarbon leader to the swivel and popper. I usually use 60-pound fluorocarbon for the poppers. Cast the popper out as far as possible and then sweep the rod to the side and make it chug or pop. Reel up the slack, and do it again. Try different levels of aggression with your popper action; the tuna can get finicky at times.
Jigging with diamond and knife jigs can be equally effective for catching yellowfin and blackfin tuna. I use a reel that has a capacity for 300 yards of 30-pound monofilament. I will load it up with 50-pound braided line and tie a 100-pound ball bearing swivel to the mainline with a double Palomar knot. Then I tie a 4- to 5-foot fluorocarbon leader to the the diamond or knife jig, using the San Diego jam knot with the fluorocarbon. The water is more than 3,000 feet deep, so I adjust my bottom machine to only ready down to 500 feet, at this point I am only interested in that upper water column to look for bait and the tuna themselves. I’ll have my anglers drop down to the depth that I see the bigger fish showing up on the screen and also take note of where the strikes occur on their retrieves. Jigging upward and reeling in the slack and working the bait towards the surface is very deadly on yellowfin and blackfin tuna. Dropping down a little passed where the tuna are and burning the lure upwards through them and abruptly stopping above them will also attract strikes from tuna. That is a trick that we use a lot on amberjack. Being in the ready position while your diamond or knife jig is falling to the desired depth will serve you well. Many times your lure will simply stop falling because a tuna has snatched it up, reel up the slack, if there is any, and hang on.
Chunking for tuna is a technique many of us have learned while tuna fishing on the Midnight Lump over in Louisiana. It works extremely well out at our deepwater Spars. I set up a drift a half-mile up-current of the Spar and then start cutting up pogy shad or bonita and pitching over the chunks. At the same time, I will have a two or three anglers drifting back chunks of pogy shad or bonita on a circle hook. The circle hook is connected to a 50- to 80-pound, 5-foot section of fluorocarbon that is connected to the mainline with a 100-pound ball bearing swivel.
Tuna have giant eyes and have great vision so the near invisibility of fluorocarbon is a must at times. If the water is extra-clear and it is daylight, or if it is nighttime and there is a big moon, I go with the 50-pound fluorocarbon leader. At night with cloud cover or not much moonlight, you can get away with 60-pound or 80-pound fluorocarbon. Daytime cloud cover or less than perfect water clarity obviously allows for the bigger fluorocarbon also. Seas can also help determine what size fluorocarbon to use. If it is slick calm and the water is ultra clear the 50-pound fluoro will be the ticket. Choppy seas will allow you to increase your fluorocarbon size to 60-pound or 80-pound with good results. While drifting the baits, I’ll have my anglers spread out evenly down one side of my boat to ensure that they don’t get tangled up. I’ll have them feed the line as we drift so that their chunk is drifting back naturally without any line tension and the bait is not spinning. This is best done by having the rod and reel in the rod holder and the spool disengaged but the clicker on. I’ll have my guys grab the line at the end of the rod and pull it down to the reel away from the boat and feed it from there. The line is being fed just fast enough to keep slack in the line and when the fish hits you just let go of the line and ease into the drag, which will usually put that circle hook right into the corner of a tunafish’s mouth.
One of the keys to this type of fishing is to never stop chumming. The tuna are in your slick for one reason: You are feeding them. About eight years ago over in Venice, La., a charter captain told me in a Cajun accent, “Once you stop chumming, you finish!” He might have had an “ed” on the end of “finish” but I didn’t hear it if he did. The message was clear, nonetheless, and I am sure that old trick has been around for thousands of years. Most of my “chunk” fishing is done on 30-class reels. I put a little 80-pound mono on the spool, then a about a quarter-mile of 100-pound braid, then a 200-foot top shot of 80-pound mono.
Springtime yellowfin tuna fishing in Texas is a being ready game. When the stars line up for calm seas you have got to go, the window is usually short but it is some of the best fishing of the entire year, and you will likely have it all to yourself.
Capt. Bill Cannan
(281) 380 8222
www.billcannan.com
