Top Water Tuna

We have experienced some great surface action around Hervey Bay over the last few months on both longtails and Mac tuna as well as a few Spanish mackerel & Queenfish and this should continue into May ! Any fish you can watch eat your offering adds to the experience in my books.Chasing pelagics like longtail tuna , yellowfin tuna , Spanish mackerel and Mac tuna schooled up on bait balls is already very cool “ but then getting them to eat poppers & stick baits off the top is just awesome! The best time to chase pelagics with poppers & stick baits is when they are already up on top chasing flying -fish , gar and long toms. You will often see them leaping out of the water in hot pursuit of these tasty treats when about. But I have also thrown large stick baits into bait balls when they are feeding hard on really small bait & still had them eaten. Sometimes having a lure that stands out from the crowd is better than trying to match the hatch. A surface lure is the best presentation when the longtails are not holding up on bait balls, rather travelling all the time and only stopping to massacre small pods of bait. This is when you need to watch your eyes in the sky and often it will only be one bird that will give away their position. Watch for the bird/s that have a different body language, fluttering erratically with their heads down is a giveaway. Motor along with these birds until you can get a clear shot ahead of the direction they are travelling is the key. Then crank your stickbait or popper back at a pace that will keep it skipping on top or work the stick back with long sweeps of the rod. You won't mistake the take on a popper or stick bait with most strikes being explosive and visual. Sometimes you will have multiple fish in pursuit of your lure launching themselves at it in competition. The trick is to keep cranking until you come up tight and start losing line. My favourite lures for chasing top water tuna are Shimano Ocea Orca floating pencil baits and Cotton Cordell pencil poppers. You can work the Orca pencil baits slower that the pencil poppers which need to have a steady retrieve to keep them skipping across the top. They don't have to be wound flat out however “ just enough to keep them on top and not berrying. The Orca floating pencil baits can be worked with long sweeps of your rod and short pauses. ( See video attached to this article for all the best techniques to retrieve Ocea Orca pencil baits ) My favourite combo for top water tuna is a Shimano JDM Grappler S80M “ PE4 stick matched with Twin Power SW8000 loaded with Power Pro Slick green in 40lb. I run Ocea fluorocarbon 40lb leader material the lure. Another trick I have found works well for both releasing fish in good condition and keeping your hooks in when using these top water lures is to switch the trebles over to large single hooks. I have used the Decoy jigging singles with the inline eye and they are perfect for the job. I find I pull less hooks using singles in general and you will have less trouble handling fish safely with single hooks as well. I often get asked if we eat the longtails we catch and while we release the vast majority of the fish we catch, I can say they are very tasty. Just ensure you bleed them quickly - I prefer to cut them around their pectoral fins on each side for this and then put them straight on ice. The shoulders are the prime areas for eating and sliced thin can be eaten Sushi style. I prefer to cut them into thin strips and dip them in soy sauce , lightly coat them in bread crumbs or sesame seeds and shallow fry . Then just add some cracked pepper and lemon Mmmm. Back in 2009 and 2010, CSIRO led a project in collaboration with recreational fishers, the fishing tackle industry, scientists and fishery managers in the first attempt to gather scientific information on Australia's newest "recreational only species “ longtail tuna (Thunnus tonggol). You can read the final report plus heaps of other great information on this fantastic sportfish @ http://www.longtailtuna.com.au