You have to be out of your mind to eat a freshly culled tuna...COOKED!

Quivering and bloody straight to the palate is the way to go.

:D

Mako's right...

For eating you want that fish out of the water and on deck and bleeding as fast as possible.

While ch#^&#^&#^&#^&#^&g flies at em is fun for the fight, you want to keep them footballs? Break out the heavy spinning gear/boat rods.

Just be sure you got a GOOD boat handler who can run em down right, which a good portion of the time can cut a fight in half.

These aren't exactly big blues or bass that you can muscle in, laying into 100+lb tuna is indeed a battle.

I got a Penn Senator around here that's had its sideplates flexed out under load from a football on steroids, hense the big gear kicking around. :)

man, i'd love to try my hand at tuna fishing, but alas, i dont have the gear for it...

i agree with mako and likwid about getting the fish bled and cooled down asap for better quality. stressing a fish out for so long is not great for the table fare of the fish.

as for you guys that want the experience of that big fish on flies here is what we used to do.

we used to take people marlin fishing and everyone once in a while we would get a charter that wanted to catch a marlin on fly. we didn't care because we were still getting paid and we wouldn't kill and sell the marlin anyway so it was something different to do. We would drag all kinds of teaser spreads behind the boat and off the outriggers and when we would get a one raised i would have the guy slowly send back the fly as i would pull in the teaser and that is majority of how we would get hooked up. yellowfin we would chum them up and have the guy have his fly chum line . i would imagine you would get school bluefun the same way.

someone said on this thread that luck isn't needed to land a 200 or 300# bluefin on a 20# striper spinning setup. i will take all the luck i can get on that one.


just my .02

good luck

Kav: howabout a combo of good gear/great boat handler?

Your luck definitely goes way up then...

(fwiw: Tuna WILL burn out drag plates FAST... make sure you clean and lube all your gear before you hit em up or you might see just how fast they can destroy perfectly good gear)

*heads back to re-rigging baby bird/chugger setups*
btw... those work on blues too ;)

likwid:

Having good gear and a great boat handler is definately a bonus but i certainly want some luck as well. anything can happen with big fish and light gear. i am assuming by a 20 # test line on a spinner rigged for boat striper fishing it would be something like a penn 7500 ss with a 7ft or 7.5ft rod . If I were to have to target a big size BFT I would want the 9500 SS so i could hold alot more 20# test line ( an extra couple hundred yards of line would be very useful in this situation ). i was just pointing out that an everday striper spinning outfit is probably not considered "good " gear for a 300# bft.

i have a few small spinning outfits on my boat that have 20# test on them and i would much rather use something different for that fish.

There's no doubt 200+ you don't wanna be playing with the striper gear...

But if you're gonna hunt the footballs.. that's perfect gear for it with a good long 50-80lb shock leader.
And alot of fun to boot....

As far as hardcore tuna gear, I'm not a huge fan of Penn reels, their drag plates tend to be on the small(er) side compared to alot of other gear.

I'm a huge fan of the Fin-Nor Ahab #20 spinning reel.