South Florida offshore anglers have their pick of species in May, and many of them put blackfin tuna at the top of their fish wish list. Even though the grouper season opens on May 1, and fried grouper is delicious, those fish can be difficult to catch.
Blackfin tuna, however, are abundant this month. They can be caught with live bait, dead bait, and trolling lures, and they are exceptionally tasty grilled, or pan-seared on the outside and rare on the inside.
Unlike grouper, there is no minimum size limit for blackfins, although most of them range in weight from 10 to 30 pounds. The daily bag limit is two tuna per angler or 10 per boat, whichever is greater. That means two fishermen can keep 10 blackfins and six anglers can keep a total of 12 fish.
The first step in catching blackfins is finding water where they hang out. According to Capt. Skip Dana of Deerfield Beach, purple-blue water is ideal, but tuna can also be caught in green water. More important than the water’s color is the presence of baitfish.
“I tell people to find water that’s alive, where it’s got baits and activity,” Dana said. “If you find that good, alive water, the tuna will find you.”
When he fishes in tournaments, Dana will drift with live baits such as pilchards, sardines, and goggle-eyes on flat lines, which his crew casts out behind the boat, as well as live baits on kite lines, which splash on the surface suspended from a fishing kite.
“When the conditions are right, you want a full spread out,” said Dana, who also has his crew put chunks of sardines in the water to attract the tuna, but not too many chunks.
“I think some guys over-chunk,” said Dana, who uses frozen sardines sold by tackle stores. “Don’t get crazy. You want a slow, steady stream of chunks, but not too much.
“There are so many sharks, you can’t chunk that much, otherwise you’ll have sharks up in the chum, and triggerfish.”
Local anglers lose a lot of blackfins to sharks, often reeling in only the head of a tuna after it’s been chomped. So after hooking a tuna, it’s essential to reel in the hard-fighting fish as quickly as possible.
Capt. Bouncer Smith said anglers can also chunk for tuna using a 25-pound flat of herring or squid. “You can cut it up in advance or cut it as you chunk it,” he said.
Smith noted that even when your chunking attracts tuna behind your boat, the fish won’t always eat a bait drifted back on a hook. When that happens, anglers need to go lighter and smaller with their tackle. So if you usually fish with 30-pound leaders and size 5/0 circle hooks, you might want to downsize to 20-pound leaders with a 2/0 or 1/0 hook.
Dana said that most anglers would do fine using two spinning rods with 3/0 to 5/0 hooks. Using dead or live baits, he’d put one on the surface and the other down with a 1-ounce sinker and drift in 150-220 feet.
Be aware that multiple hookups can occur when the tuna are chummed up and in a feeding frenzy. That can result in crossed lines, so it’s important for anglers to pay attention to where their fish are headed so they can go over or under a fellow angler’s fishing line.
The time of day also can be a factor in tuna fishing success.
As Capt. Mario Coté of Hollywood pointed out, blackfin tuna have big eyes that allow them to take a careful look at a bait. He uses 20-pound conventional outfits with 15-foot leaders of 40-pound fluorocarbon, which is invisible in the water. He also likes to fish for tuna early in the morning, late in the afternoon, and on cloudy days, because that’s when the sunlight is less intense.
“If you were in the water on a sunny day and you had to look up to see something, it wouldn’t be easy,” Coté explained.
Coté fishes with live pilchards on two flat lines and on two weighted lines, one down about 50 feet and the other close to the bottom. He hooks the pilchards through the nose, although other anglers hook the baits toward the tail so the pilchards swim down.
Now is also a great time to catch a tuna from a kayak. Joe Hector of the Extreme Kayak Fishing tournament series uses live bait and jigs for blackfins. His live-bait outfit is straight 30-pound monofilament with a 2/0 to 3/0 hook on a medium-heavy spinning rod. “I know the 2/0 hook is small, but I’ve had way more tuna bites on a 2/0,” said Hector, of Deerfield Beach.
“They’re definitely deep as well, so I would definitely recommend taking a jigging rod and hitting the deeper wrecks and jigging your butt off,” added Hector, who uses a vertical jig, a long, heavy piece of metal with one or two hooks attached to it. “Start at 250 feet if you’re drifting in and 80 if you’re drifting out.”
No matter how you catch a blackfin tuna, and whether you marinate it in soy sauce or teriyaki sauce or sprinkle it with olive oil, salt, and pepper before grilling or searing it, you’ll forget all about fishing for grouper once you taste it.