What an awesome fish! The toughest meanest battle I have had. The fight was incredible, like taking punches from a prize fighter. The headshake will just about pull your arm from its socket. The rod jolted hard in the rod-holder on the strike and nearly came out (it was tethered)
After a day of lack luster trolling we got covered with 3 bigeyes at the same time right at dark on the west wall of hydro. Was only able to land one. It went 154. I was spent and we took turns on the reel. 4 amazing runs deep into the spool and the 5th was straight down 800' I could not believe it. And I had some serious heat on this thing too on an 80W. One of the other hookups was on the new stella 30000...what a sound that reel made!! but the hook was not set well and it pulled during the first run off.
The next day after a pick of mahi and albacore we got lucky in the afternoon and found big yellows and albacore stacked up against a temp break. The two we kept were 76 and 84#. The albacore were about 40 or so.
On the way in we saw large bluefin crashing on halfbeaks out by the banna in 65 deg water. We slowed but did not pursue as we were out of ice and had a ways to go. If we would have caught one of them we would have had a tuna grand slam...BF, YF, albacore and BE.
Not a lights out trip but certainly a memorable one. I did not take a lot of photos as there was only two of us and I was busy doing other things most of the time.
We burned 125 gallons of diesel, transit cruise at 27, and trolled for two days all day once we arrived.