Caveman Sportfishing
07-09-2016, 10:14 PM
We know of at least three locations where the Yellowfin day chunk bite was totally off the charts. The best is out of reach for many that fish out of the more Northern ports but I thought it might be on interest to those that target tuna on this site. The best Yellowfin bite that I know of is off the Northern VA coast along the 20 fathom line south of Ocean City, Maryland. Boats we know had 15-17 Yellowfins in the box by noon and they did not start fishing until around 7:00 am. There was a lot of trollers working these lumps but few if any of them caught any tuna as it was almost all chunking. Have seen this happen on the inshore lumps and hills so many times in the past when we used to have tuna fishing like this. We used to fish these hills and lumps years ago as they held Bluefins up to 200 lbs. on a regular basis with Yellowfins in the mix. I personally have not made the long run as we have some great tuna fishing within 40 miles of our home port in Cape May right now and there is really no reason to run 80 miles when we can run 40 miles.
The last few days has produced absolute stupid tuna fishing mostly with jigs and chunking and the boats that came back to various South Jersey ports all had some great catches on nice size Yellowfin in the 40-50 lb. range and a few Bluefins have pushed the 80-90 lb range but most were 45-60 lbs. The one negative is most bites came on 30 lb fluorocarbon leader which resulted in a lot of tuna busting off. The Yellowfins were manageable on the lighter leader but the Bluefins up over 60 lbs become a real challenge on leader that size and many bust off due to light leader failure. I think it is worth mentioning the Big Eyes have now shown up in the local southern canyons so we can and will do a combo inshore tuna trip and target Big Eyes on the same trip. Overall some pretty decent tuna fishing happening right now on the 20 fathom lumps and hills.
The last few days has produced absolute stupid tuna fishing mostly with jigs and chunking and the boats that came back to various South Jersey ports all had some great catches on nice size Yellowfin in the 40-50 lb. range and a few Bluefins have pushed the 80-90 lb range but most were 45-60 lbs. The one negative is most bites came on 30 lb fluorocarbon leader which resulted in a lot of tuna busting off. The Yellowfins were manageable on the lighter leader but the Bluefins up over 60 lbs become a real challenge on leader that size and many bust off due to light leader failure. I think it is worth mentioning the Big Eyes have now shown up in the local southern canyons so we can and will do a combo inshore tuna trip and target Big Eyes on the same trip. Overall some pretty decent tuna fishing happening right now on the 20 fathom lumps and hills.