1st Tuna On Spinning Gear

[Moses]

It's the end of last week and a couple buddies and I are weighing options for fishing on saturday. The weather cooperates and we launch in Plymouth at 445am. Beautiful morning and all looks good except my GPS/FF keeps shutting down. Damn loose connections. After troubleshooting for 20 minutes I locate the problem and we're off for the bank.

We arrive at 555am and lines are in immediately. Signs of life everywhere - birds, bait, whales and small pods of tuna chasing half beaks. After 2.5hrs of the skunk trolling and seeing others hook up, we check the rigs again and find some seaweed on both.

With lines in the boat we decide to try our luck moving away from the fleet and seeing if a small pod will eventually come close enough for a cast. Well, around 30-45 minutes into our drift a pod starts crashing in front. My two buddies cast but no luck. At the same time, a pod crashes just off our starboard about 20 yds. I cast and it's Game On baby!

The initial run was amazing. My reel starts smoking and the fish takes almost 250yds of braid. My buddy takes the helm and we start following. We luckily avoided many high flyers since the battle took almost 1.5 hrs to subdue this beast.

My friends got some great pics and video which I'll post. In the end, the fish measured 56.5" to fork of tail. My equipment was a St Croix 7' saltwater series med heavy, Shimano Spheros 12000 with 65lb PP and a 80lb mono leader. I was using an olive Habs needle with upgraded hardware and triple split rings.