Article; Portland Tuna- What I've Learnt

Southern Bluefin Tuna, Kingies, Marlin and other game fish.
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Article; Portland Tuna- What I've Learnt

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:07 pm

I have attempted to put all of NCR1 writing together. The topic is locked so I or another mod can add as necessary.
ncr1 wrote:Hey all,

I’m currently recovering from my transplant (which has gone well so far), meaning that I’ve got quite a bit of time on my hands. I’ve been eagerly reading the tuna reports from Portland wishing that I could be part of the action. But alas, that will have to wait until next year.

I’ve been incredibly lucky with the opportunities I’ve been given to fish for Bluefin tuna of the south-west coast over the past ten years. Before I moved to Melbourne, I had lived in Warrnambool for a number of years and have a good friend who has the boat, equipment and flexibility at work to chase the SBT on a semi-regular basis. At the time, I was also lucky enough to have the same flexibility during the working week and was able to join him as a regular deckie on his boat (along with another mate). We began fishing for tuna off Portland in 2006 and like most fishos at the time, we didn’t have much of a clue what we were doing. Since those early days, I estimate that I’ve been a deckie on his boat for at least 60-70 outings and needless to say, we experienced some amazing tuna action over these trips. In fact, I can honestly say that there has only been one single trip where we failed to land a tuna, whereas we bagged out on SBT in probably about two-thirds of those trips with fish ranging from 6kg to 132kg (we didn’t always keep our bag though). We were truly spoilt, but we worked hard, did a lot of research, asked a lot of questions, and learnt a lot over that time.

So while I’m sitting at home recovering, I thought I would share a number of things that I’ve learnt from this time to hopefully give others a better chance of getting into the action. There’s a lot to get through so I’ll write it up in sections, posting as I go. But since writing takes time, you might have to wait a little while between posts.

A Brief History

Prior to the 2006 season, tuna fishing along the south-west coast was very hit-and-miss and there were only ever a handful of boats that would spend time seriously targeting bluefin. If tuna were to be caught, most were landed out of Port MacDonnell and were generally only school-sized fish. Tuna frames at the Portland ramp would have likely been a real oddity.

But a group of local anglers fishing off the shelf at Port Fairy in April 2006 started everything off when one lucky guy returned with an 80kg+ barrel. Obviously, news of this capture quickly flew around the internet and social media, but many people at the time thought that it was just a lucky one-off. However, a number of switched on locals decided to do some further exploration in the days following and going by the reports coming in soon after from those lucky anglers who were involved, the following weeks of fishing were one of the most intense periods of big barrel tuna fishing that anyone has ever experienced. Among the small flotilla of boats exploring offshore at Portland and Port Fairy at the time, reports of massive schools of 100kg+ tuna free jumping out of the water around the boat were consistently reported. Many were hooked, most were lost, but there were also dozens of big barrels landed during this period. I remember reading the reports at the time (while I was stuck on land) and being blown away. This gamefishing bonanza had just come from nowhere – surely this was just a freak occurrence and won’t be repeated!

By memory, the craziness of the 2006 season had subsided by May or early June with only the very occasional report of a barrel hookup still filtering through the grapevine. There was also a few school-sized fish being caught. It was roughly around this time that our crew finally got our bums into gear and had our first expedition out of Portland. We trolled a long, long way that day and by early afternoon it looked like we were going to register our first donut. But we were saved by a 20kg bluefin that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. It was no barrel, but it was still very exciting to get one on the board. It seemed that the tuna reports dried up completely after that day and we didn’t bother making another trip that year – time to pack up the gear for the winter and hope that the tuna would be back in 2007.

Fast forward to March 2007, and our crew was pretty keen to find out whether the tuna had returned. Back then, the tuna season was generally considered to be between April and July, so when we launched the boat at Port MacDonnell in early March, we didn’t have a great deal of confidence. I remember at the time that the boat ramp carpark was almost empty, except for the fleet of local crayfishermen who were launching their small tender boats.

It was a relatively calm day, so we headed straight towards the shelf. We got out there and started trolling, but there weren’t any signs of fish – no birds and no bait on the sounder, and of course, we were the only boat out there. After about two hours of trolling along edge of the shelf, we heard that great sound of the line snapping off the outrigger and then the howl of line peeling off the reel. This was quickly followed by two other rods screaming off. Triple hookup!

The three of us each grabbed a rod and started the fight while trying to clear the other couple of lines. The rod I had grabbed was a basic 15kg gummy shark rod and only a couple of seconds after I picked the rod up, the fish decided to charge towards the back of the boat. I wound like crazy to pick up the slack, but then the fish changed direction and bolted towards the ocean floor at a great rate of knots. It must have only torn off 20-30 metres of line on this run before everything went slack. The line had snapped above the double. The drag was set well, so I blamed some bad rigging or bad maintenance.

The other two were still hooked up, both on 24kg tackle. But after only five minutes, the fish our captain was fighting had spat the hook. Down to one hookup now. Fortunately, this one stayed solid and my mate settled in for the fight. About twenty minutes into the fight, we all looked at each other an agreed that this was a much bigger fish than just a schoolie. Our suspicions were confirmed about an hour later when we saw the fish up on the surface about 200 metres out the back of the boat – it was a definitely a big barrel and because it was so close, we naively thought the fight would be over soon! But then the fish dived deep and it we didn’t see it again for another three hours.

I think my mate on the rod was on the edge of cardiac arrest when we finally worked out on an effective approach to ‘plane’ the fish up from the depths with the boat. Metre by metre of line was retrieved over the next hour until we finally saw the flash of silver below. You could hear our jaws drop in unison as we first saw the fish nearing the surface. As we sunk the first gaff in, we almost stood still in shock as we began to comprehend the size of this beast. After a four-hour fight, my mate was completely gone and therefore it was up to me and the captain to drag the fish over the side. That was no easy task. But eventually the huge lump of silver landed on the floor and high fives were shared all round.

We had a couple of contacts at the local gamefishing club, so we were able to call ahead for a set of scales to weigh our catch. Apparently the club was also keen on publicizing their local fishing grounds to the wider community and had arranged for a local television crew to meet us at the ramp. The fish tipped the scales at 132kg and at the time, it was one of the biggest southern bluefin tuna caught by a recreational angler in recent memory anywhere in Australia. It was also bigger than any of the barrels caught during the 2006 season. And because it was still unsure whether the events of 2006 would be repeated, news of the first barrel of the 2007 season generated a hell of a lot of excitement among the gamefishing community. Video of our tuna being hoisted from the boat even made a brief appearance on the Channel Ten late night national news a couple of nights later.

The 2007 season ended up being a subdued version of 2006 in regards to the numbers of barrels caught. The barrels were there and being caught, they just weren’t in the same numbers as the year before. However, there were stacks of school fish between 15-30kg mixed in with some nice big albacore. We had a great year on these smaller models, bagging out on nearly every trip. It was incredibly good fishing at times.

Of course, we now know that seasons 2006-07 were not just a passing phase, and that a whole new gamefishery had kicked off along the south-west coast that is still going on today. Barrels are certainly no longer considered a rare capture, and many much bigger fish than our 132kg model have been weighed in since then. It’s now hard to remember Portland before it was hit by tuna fever.

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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:08 pm

Changing Times

Since the 2006-07 seasons, it has been common to question whether a) these huge runs of tuna have always been there and just haven’t been uncovered/targeted properly in previous seasons, or b) whether these increased migrations of fish are a new phenomenon driven by more favourable environmental conditions, less pressure from commercial fishing, or any of the other infinite and unknown factors.

We will almost certainly never know the answer for sure. However, in my personal view, I would lean more towards option b). Afterall, if the fish were there in the same abundances as previous seasons, I believe it would be very hard for any recreational angler to avoid them. In recent years, you can go for a coffee at the lighthouse café at Cape Nelson and consistently watch birds hammering the water with tuna jumping all around. Further down the coast, I have seen big schools of tuna busting up just a few hundred metres from the Warrnambool breakwall. If this were in the 90s and early 2000s, similar sightings would attract huge interest and excitement from the recreational fishing community. Nowadays, these sightings are a relatively common occurrence.

I also believe that more tuna fisheries are being discovered simply because of the increased number of boats that are trying for them (and because some are better equipped and more adventurous as well). Back in 2006/07, the vast amount of serious tuna hunting was done at Portland or Port MacDonnell, with most boats heading out wide to the shelf (unless they found birds working in closer). However since then, a combination of more widespread schools of fish and more boats looking for them has likely extended the range of locations where SBT are seriously targeted (big SBT at Phillip Island – WTF?!). Having barrels being brought into Hastings to be weighed was completely unthinkable a few years ago.

The assumed duration of the annual SBT season has also been shaken up in recent years. As I mentioned in the previous post, it was not that long ago when the ‘normal’ SBT season was considered to be between April to July. These days, it seems that they can be caught all year around, with some recent memorable runs of barrels happening in the springtime.

It’s also interesting to compare the epicenter of activity, Portland, and how the fishing has changed there in the past decade. Back when we first started out, a ‘standard’ trip out of Portland meant almost always travelling to the shelf. Because my friend’s boat only had a two-stroke outboard at the time, this meant we would also have to carry extra jerry cans of fuel onboard to be able to clock up enough kilometres. We would consistently use 200-300 litres of fuel per trip! But now, it seems that there is a much smaller proportion of boats that make the journey to the shelf and many more that are happy to focus their efforts closer to shore.

Again, that brings up the question from those early days, whether we were naively bypassing big schools of SBT inshore while we burnt huge amounts of fuel searching for them out wide on the shelf? I feel that at the time we were all very alert to the signs of feeding schools of tuna, and there didn’t seem to be the same level of activity in close during those days, at least in comparison to what there is today. But I could be wrong.

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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:09 pm

Finding The Fish

This post is the first where I will be offering some advice on how to find and catch SBT. I will say from the outset that the following are only representative of my own opinions drawing from my own experiences out on the water. Many other people will have their own different approaches to chasing tuna that may end up being more effective than what I describe. But at least I can offer one opinion to get people started.

Finding schools of feeding tuna can be incredibly difficult in a big ocean, but sometimes it can also be incredibly easy. At the right time of year, there have been countless reports of boats heading out of Portland Harbour in the morning, quickly finding fish feeding close to shore, bagging out quickly and then being back at the ramp to clean their fish before 10am. But no one needs advice to find fish when they are like this. But when the tuna schools are much more spread out, or even when the schools are there but aren’t taking lures, a trip to Portland can very easily turn into a long day on the water without any action. Before hitting the water, many anglers will initially track down some reliable reports from the previous few days fishing from their mates or the local tackle shop and then head straight to the exact area where those tuna had been caught previously, often with the precise GPS coordinates in hand. And for good reason, a list of fresh and reliable reports from the same fishing grounds you will be targeting is a great resource to have up your sleeve.

However, I have always considered it best to use these local reports as only a rough guide of where one should focus their attention on any given trip. I might have been given a report telling me that there were dozens of fish caught at spot ‘X’ yesterday, yet I would still be very reluctant to head straight to that spot. The reason being is that every other boat has most likely been given the same report and that patch of ocean will most likely resemble a carpark by the time we arrive. When I reflect upon the most memorable and truly incredible tuna fishing sessions we’ve had along the way, the most consistent factor at these times was that we were the only boat in sight. Sure, we have a number of days where we have bagged out on tuna while jostling for position amongst all the other circling boats. But without a doubt, our very best sessions and our biggest fish have always been caught while we’ve had that particular piece of ocean to ourselves. Sometimes this has meant travelling to a location where no one else is heading, while other times it has meant getting there earlier than everyone else, or even hanging around longer in the day until the other boats have headed home.

Of course, this low traffic approach doesn’t just mean selecting any random piece of open-ocean where you think the boat traffic will be at a minimum - you still need to locate schools of fish that are actively feeding. Admittedly, on weekends and public holidays where boat traffic is generally at its peak, it may be almost impossible to find fish without other boats being nearby. This is will continue to be an issue given the ever-increasing popularity of tuna fishing along the south-west. But I still believe it to be very worthwhile to target the less busy areas, provided that you still find yourself in a fishy area. And that’s where the real challenge comes in – going against the grain and finding fishy water on your own (or perhaps with only a couple of others nearby). This approach takes a bit of self-confidence and commitment and you’re probably going to have a couple of trips where you catch little or nothing, while the crowds of other boats were spending the day bagging out closer inshore. But as long as your pride isn’t damaged too much, you do your research properly, and you stick to the plan rather than being seduced by radio reports of hookups elsewhere, I believe that the low-traffic, DIY approach will certainly catch you more fish over the longer term.

The first decision to make is to choose your launch location. Personally, I would always instantly bypass Portland on busy weekends such as Easter and Anzac Day, because the boat traffic would be enormous, particularly if the weather forecast is even half decent. Ideally it would be great to have the flexibility to fish during the working week instead of the weekends, but I know that this scenario is more of a luxury and not always possible. But if a weekend is all you have and every man and his dog is at Portland, why not consider launching from Port Fairy or Warrnambool instead? There will still be a decent amount of boats launching from these locations, but these couple of ramps will always attract smaller crowds than Portland and the boat traffic will continue thin out the more offshore you travel. The other thing about these more easterly locations is that the edge of the shelf is a bloody long way – which I actually think can be an advantage since many/most boats won’t be willing to put in the extra kilometres on the water. Needless to say, the weather needs to be suitable, but starting your trip from Port Fairy or Warrnambool gives you a bit more scope in regards to locating ‘unworked’ pieces of ocean. And if schools of tuna are being caught at Portland, most of the time they will be found further east as well. It will just be a matter of finding them yourself rather than other boats finding them for you.

Which brings me to the second decision you need to make - which part of the ocean are you going to focus your efforts on? This is the point when I usually take the most notice of the local fishing reports. Sometimes you will get reports of tuna being taken from almost everywhere - off the shelf, from the 100-200m mark, as well as in close to shore. Having reports of fish that are widespread is great, but it doesn’t offer you a clear focal point on where to best concentrate your efforts. There are too many options and this can lead to analysis paralysis. Under these circumstances, my inclination would be to initially begin the long motor out towards the shelf edge and in the meantime, while we are cruising along the many kilometers of ocean out to the shelf (not trolling), all of us onboard would be keeping a sharp eye out for signs of fishy water (i.e. working birds, bait on the sounder and hopefully jumping tuna). If along the way we were to come across some convincingly fishy water and there are not many other boats present, we would throw the lures in and start trolling for half an hour or so. If there were no sign of tuna after that time, we would pull the rigs in and continue on towards the shelf again. If we reach the edge of the shelf without seeing anything notable, we would then focus our efforts along specific geographical features of the shelf edge (see below). The idea behind this approach is that we would be covering and observing a large distance of ocean that is representative of a cross-section of different oceanic environments (i.e. inshore areas, the mid-shelf plateau, as well as the outer edge of the shelf). That way, without knowing what ocean environment/cross-section/gradient the tuna will be holding, we’ve at least covered our bases as best as we can. In an ideal world, we would troll lures all the way to the shelf, but then it would take all day just to get there. And hopefully, we’ll find the fish well before we actually reach the shelf and be spared from having to travel those kinds of distances on the water.

The only reason I would NOT consider the shelf as an initial target location would be if the local reports were clearly indicating that no (or very few) fish were being caught from these offshore areas. Afterall, it’s a long way to go and try to ‘defy-the-odds’ when no one else has been able to catch anything in that area. However, I rate the waters around the shelf edge to be some of the most productive fishing grounds available, and it is not often where the shelf edge has little action to offer. But sometimes the reports coming from inshore areas are just too good to ignore and you have to head towards spot ‘X’ and join in the festivities with the other boats. A scenario like this happened back in 2010 when there were some very consistent reports of barrels being caught in only 50 meters of water off Port Fairy. I had just moved to Melbourne at that time, but I made the trek one weekend to try my chances on these fish with the old crew. We fished the Sunday and when we arrived, there were boats everywhere across a small 5km patch of ocean. There were even a few who were clearly hooked up on big fish. However, we trolled for most the day without a look and registered our first and only tuna fishing donut. After I had travelled back to Melbourne later that day with my tail between my legs, my other two mates decided to have another crack in the same area on the following Tuesday. Needless to say that I got a phone call later that afternoon to say that they had just landed two 100kg+ barrels from a double hookup! These fish wouldn’t have been caught without responding to local reports.

But what about a situation where there are no local reports coming in from anywhere and you have to try and predict where the tuna might be holding at any one time? You can always flip a coin and ‘blindly’ troll around the open ocean hoping to strike it lucky. But I think you can still be a bit more targeted than that.

Like any form of gamefishing, finding the gamefish is all about finding the bait. And it’s no different with SBT along the south-west. One of the most popular ways of finding bait-holding areas, particularly by fisherman along the eastern coast of Australia, is by using up-to-the-date sea surface temperature (SST) charts. Generally, concentrations of bait can be found in locations where warm and cold oceanic currents butt up against each other and generate distinct water temperature gradients. Bait is often found concentrated right next to these gradients.

A number of anglers fishing out of Portland use SST technology to help them track down the tuna, but I personally believe that these charts have a lot less utility along the south-western coast in comparison to the east coast. Along the coasts of Queensland and New South Wales, the common situation is that warm tropical oceanic currents from the north flow in a southerly direction (i.e. the EAC) and eventually intersect with cold water coming up from the south, often leading to distinct temperature gradients. Yet, along the south-west coast of Victoria, the oceanic currents are usually travelling from west to east, rather than north to south, meaning that the temperature differentials are nowhere near as extreme as they can be along the eastern coast.

However, oceanic currents, particularly the Bonney upwelling, still concentrate bait in various areas along the south-west coast. The Bonney upwelling is where cold, deep and nutrient-rich currents moving eastwards from the Great Australian Bight towards Tasmania, hit the steep edge of the shelf off Portland and get ‘sling-shotted’ towards the surface. This is where the nutrients from the cold deep waters are allowed to mix with the sunny and warm surface water, which then generates the ideal conditions for the whole food-chain to kick off. The Bonney upwelling phenomenon is the reason why the waters off Portland are renowned as a unique feeding ground for blue whales. It’s also why Portland is at the epicentre of the south-west SBT fishery.

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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:11 pm

ncr1 wrote:Ah yes, the good old days (unfortunately well before I was born). I remember fishing out wide from Port Welshpool in the early 90s and having one of those fishing maps with labels showing what species to expect and where you could find them. According to these maps,it appeared that SBT were a common capture around the Cliffy Island group and widespread further offshore. Yet I don't remember hearing of any SBT being caught during the 90's out of Welshpool. We also used to fish the gamefishing tournament down there, but I'm not sure if they every weighed in an SBT. So I'm guessing the advice on these maps were based on reports from yesteryear (even though it was an updated publication at the time).

Based on my readings of the history of gamefishing in Victoria, it does appear that the SBT were there in numbers back in the early days, but I'm pretty sure they were much more sporadic in abundance (at best) during the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.

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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:12 pm

Lure Selection

When it comes to SBT fishing and gamefishing in general, there are so many different topics and techniques that can, and have been covered. And it’s pretty easy to do a google search and chase up endless information on the subject. In this thread, I will only offer advice or suggestions on aspects of SBT fishing that I firmly believe in based on my personal research and knowledge, as well as contributing techniques or advice that may differ somewhat from the general ‘mainstream’ information that is often churned out on social media or in tackle shops. Otherwise, I might just be regurgitating other people’s methods and offering nothing new.

In this regard, when it comes to selecting a range of lures for SBT trolling, I really don’t have a lot to contribute. Our boat has landed 100s of SBT over the years, but I haven’t noted any consistent pattern in lure type, size, or trolling method to have any strong suggestions as to what would be my ‘go-to-lure’. On reflection, every lure we had in our possession seemed to have its day in the sun. On tough days where fish would be hard to find, it would be just a matter of trolling a variety of different skirts and hardbodies and hope for the best. Some days we would notice a pattern (e.g. more hits and hookups on small skirts trolled well back from the boat) and we would change our spread accordingly. However, this didn’t happen often. More often than not, when we found an active school of fish, everything would be taken, with three- to five-way hookups being fairly common.

One thing I would suggest on days when the fish are hard to find, is to pack up the hardbodies for a while and just run skirts, particularly jet heads. This is simply because you can troll with skirts just that little bit faster speed and subsequently cover more distance throughout the day. Just a couple of extra knots faster trolling speed will allow you cover many more kilometres of a ‘search pattern’ over an entire day. When SBT are hard to find, I would much rather focus on covering more distance throughout the day, rather than worry about whether the tuna might have a preference between skirts or hardbodies.

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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:13 pm

A Word on Gear Selection

As with all forms of fishing, cheap and crappy gear WILL catch fish. In fact, there are likely to be plenty of scenarios out there where a fish of a lifetime has been landed using the cheapest and most poorly maintained outfit that the angler had in his possession at that time. Gamefishing is no different. I’m certain that over the years, there have been a number of 100kg+ tuna that have been successfully fought and landed using bargain-basement rod and reel outfits. Why then, if these captures were to be true, would anyone be compelled to spend in excess of $1200 on a single premium rod and reel setup, when they can order a brand new lever drag reel and fully rollered rod on ebay for less than $150?

This is a particularly difficult question for someone who is just getting into gamefishing and wants to invest much of their hard-earned into setting themselves up for the first time. I think it’s completely understandable for someone who has just poured $40k of their life savings into their first offshore boat, to then be very hesitant to want to cough up another $5k to buy a spread of top-of-the-line gamefishing outfits. At the time, it seems much more rational to start with an arsenal of lower grade gear and work up from there as you replenish your bank account and gain more experience on the water. But when it comes to gearing up for gamefishing and the budget is tight, does one actually need to buy specialized gamefishing gear in the first place? What advantages do these specializations (e.g. lever drag reels, rollered rods, heavier line classes, etc) offer us in comparison to our run-of-the-mill snapper and gummy gear?

I ask these questions because I firmly believe that a well-rigged, well-maintained 10-15kg gummy outfit (threadline or overhead able to handle 8kg+ of drag) is all that is needed to land school tuna up to 30kg. If SBT grew no bigger than this size, things would be a lot easier (and cheaper) as there would be no need for specialized gamefishing gear at all. Therefore, I believe that all decisions about gear selection for SBT fishing should NOT be based upon school sized fish, but rather should be based upon giving yourself the best chance possible of landing a barrel should you be lucky enough to hook one in the future. The only other scenario where I believe that specialized gear might be necessary would be if you were to target smaller fish on lighter line, where for example, catching a 25kg school SBT on 6kg line class is equivalent to boating a 100kg barrel on 24kg line class. In my mind, what you are buying with increasingly specialized gear is risk insurance. You are paying for gear that you believe will give you an extra advantage during a long fight with a big fish. In other words, by paying extra for specialized gamefishing gear, you are effectively trying to reduce the overall risk that you’ll lose a trophy fish mid-fight.

When first starting out in SBT fishing and initially seeking out advice on gear selection, I would imagine that it would be a pretty common experience to be led straight towards the 24-37kg line classes, lever drag reels (possibly with two-speed gearing), wind-on leaders, and fully rollered rods (or at least those with heavy duty fixed guides). I get the feeling that many novice anglers will simply choose gear within these ‘categories’ because this is the ‘default’ gear that they will need to catch tuna. But I’m not sure there is enough detailed questioning about what these specializations really offer in comparison to more basic technology and most importantly, how might they provide us with the greatest advantage when fighting big fish. I tend to take a minimalist approach to these questions. Firstly, is my basic 15kg gummy outfit actually capable catching a barrel? If not, then why? What am I risking if I don’t have roller guides and a shorter, heavier rod? What is it about tiagras that make them preferred over TLDs? Why do I need to upgrade to 24kg or 37kg line class, why not 15kg or even 60kg? Everyone seems to use wind-on leaders, but what am I risking if I don’t use one?

From my experience, I have found that the bulk of mainstream advice on SBT gear selection offered in tackle shops and elsewhere doesn’t necessarily offer you the best chance of catching a barrel. Instead, by thinking critically and rationally about the task at hand (i.e. successfully fighting and landing a barrel), and being able to more specifically outline what you will be asking your gear to achieve, it will certainly give you a much better idea of how to select the right gear for you. Therefore, my next set of posts will try and cover what I believe will maximize the advantages of gamefishing gear when hooked up to a big fish.
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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:14 pm

My Credentials

I have been very lucky to have been given many opportunities to gamefish over the years – I think my first trip was a shark fishing trip off the Nobbies when I was only 11 years old (25 years ago!). Since then I have fished several locations from Bermagui to Port MacDonnell and landed some quality gamefish over that time. However, I have been a little hesitant in regards to offering my advice on this forum, particularly when it comes to landing big tuna. This reason being is that I’ve never actually caught a barrel, and have only ever hooked up once and that was lost in the first few minutes of the fight due to some bad rigging. Therefore, what gives me the right to advise others on the best way to catch barrels?

First of all, among the lucky club of anglers in this country who have landed a barrel, there are very, very few individuals who have caught more than one or two in their lifetime. There is no doubt that each of these lucky anglers learnt an awful lot while fighting their fish, but does one or two experiences fighting a barrel automatically make them experts on the subject? These folks are likely to be better informed than the average angler, but having genuine expertise on barrel-fighting is very hard to come by and is perhaps restricted to a few charter boat captains who have had multiple successes over the years with different gear and different anglers.

I am not a charter boat captain and I certainly don’t consider myself to be an expert in barrel fishing, or an expert in any other form of fishing for that matter. However, I do have considerable experience in light-line gamefishing, mainly using the 8kg line class. Over the years I estimate that I’ve caught around 20-30 SBT above 20kg on the 8kg line class (biggest 34kg – IGFA world record) and also quite a few makos, threshers and blue sharks (biggest 64kg thresher – junior GFAA national record). If you allow me consider that the 20-34kg SBT that I’ve caught on 8kg line is equivalent to catching fish in the range of 60-102kg on 24kg line class, then I feel like this has given me plenty of opportunities to ‘test’ my gear and as a result, I have learnt plenty from trial-and-error and have refined my methods greatly as a result. And among the lessons that I’ve learned, I strongly believe that much of them are also very applicable to the heavier line classes, hence my want to share this info. Since learning about fighting barrels by trial-and-error is a rarity, I think lessons learnt from light-line gamefishing can offer a different and valuable perspective.

More to come soon.

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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:15 pm

Sunset Drag: Much, Much More Than a Last Resort

The primary advantage of a lever drag reel is that upon pre-setting a desired amount of drag as a starting point (i.e. strike drag), the lever drag system then allows you to quickly and efficiently (and hopefully accurately) increase or decrease the amount of drag with a just simple slide of the lever. Ideally, in addition to the standard strike drag setting, there should also be a few other marks above and below the lever arc where the drag setting has been pre-determined following calibration. For example, for the 24kg line-class it would be typical to set the strike drag at 8kg (i.e. one third of the breaking strain) and then afterwards, establish what amount of drag the reel pulls at low-sunset (i.e. when lever is just above depressable strike button) and max-sunset (i.e. lever as far forward as possible). As a hypothetical guess, let’s just say these drag points might equate to 12kg and 20kg. You might also want to work out where a lighter drag setting below the strike drag, say 4kg for example, is positioned on the lever arc.

Most gamefishos are aware of the importance of setting their drag before heading out on the water – you certainly don’t want to be guessing what the drag is once you’ve hooked up to a barrel. However, I imagine that only a small proportion of anglers, when they finally hookup to that fish-of-a-lifetime after years of trying, would then be courageous or brave enough to push the lever drag above the strike setting (e.g. 8kg drag) and into the sunset zone (e.g. 12-20kg drag). Sunset drag is often considered a last resort option. And when you think about it, after all these years of effort on the water, all the 1000s of liters of fuel burnt, all the money you’ve spent on the boat and the gear, it is completely understandable that when you finally hook up on that barrel, that you would want to take a more conservative, softly-softly fighting approach rather than going-for-broke. But one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt over the years is that by NOT making regular use of the sunset zone when fighting SBT, you are doing yourself a major disservice - you are completely underutilizing the true capacity of your gear.

I learnt this lesson over a number of years from my light-line gamefishing experience. I remember the very first SBT I caught on the 8kg line class. The hookup was only in 30 metres of water off Port Mac, so I very much took the softly-softly fighting approach and kept my drag set at strike (i.e. 2.6kg drag) throughout the whole fight. My confidence to increase my drag also wasn’t helped when I felt some scuffing on the line as it slipped over my fingers. We, along with two other boats in our party had done well on school-sized SBT the day before, but this was the only hookup any of the boats had registered on this particular day and we naturally assumed it would just be another run-of-the-mill schoolie. However, after about half an hour of fighting this fish, the other two boats nearby decided to stop trolling and casually cruised over to us (at a safe distance) to spectate, thinking that I may have hooked a much bigger fish. It took another 15 minutes of fighting to bring the fish to the gaff and perhaps somewhat disappointingly, there was nothing exceptional about this fish - a standard 18kg SBT. Still a nice capture on the line class, but certainly hard to justify a 45 minute fight. A few playful jeers were shouted from the other boats after they saw the fish being landed – obviously it failed to meet their expectations. Oh well, I had still landed my first SBT on 8kg line, so I was still very happy. But I knew I would have to find a better and faster way of landing tuna on lighter gear so that I wouldn’t be overtly ‘wasting’ valuable fishing time. Afterall, it’s a bit of a luxury to be able to gamefish with lighter line classes, but to be given consistent opportunities I really need to maintain the respect and support of the captain and other crew members, since they are the ones who will be waiting around and twiddling their thumbs while I’m ‘playing on bream gear’. Accordingly, the first thing I did when I got home was to respool the reel with new and unscuffed 8kg mono, ready for my next rumble.

The next big lesson also occurred out of Port Mac, but this time off the shelf. There were three of us onboard and I was at the wheel. We were trolling along in some very calm seas and bang, the portside rigger went snap and the 24kg rig howled – we were on! I kept trolling hoping to induce another strike and within an instant, bang, the short corner outfit was also hooked up. I maintained the trolling speed hoping to secure the trifecta, but after another 30 seconds or so I gave up, put the motor in idle and went down the back to clear the other lines. As I went over to start winding in my 8kg outfit, I was shocked to see that the reel was two-thirds empty!! Apparently, my fellow crew member had set the spread, but somehow forgot to put the ratchet on and the drag was only just above free-spool! I quickly pushed the lever up to strike and felt that lovely feeling of weight at the end – somehow I was on too!

With the other two guys hooked up on the heavier line classes, it was pretty clear that our plan would be to get those two fish onboard first and then concentrate on mine. And within 10-15 minutes, both of my friend’s fish were lying on the floor of the boat. Surprisingly, this pair of SBT were noticeably bigger than the vast majority we had caught previously – certainly not barrels, but easily 30kg+ each. I became a bit more excited at this point, because it was very likely that I was hooked up to a SBT of a similar size and I knew in the back of my mind that the IGFA world record for SBT on the 8kg line class at that time was at a fairly low benchmark of 32kg. I could be onto a world-record fish – how often does someone get that opportunity?! Suddenly, the fight had taken on a new dimension.

Thanks to a well-emptied spool, I was forced to spend much of the first part of the fight regaining a most of my line. Luckily the fish didn’t give me too much trouble during this period and it didn’t take me too long to get the tuna within about 100 metres of the boat. Knowing what I was potentially hooked onto, I made the decision to take a conservative approach to begin with and then basically see what happens. The fight was a slog from this point on and as the first hour of the fight ticked over, we eventually saw a silver flash circling beneath the boat. ‘I’m nearly there’, I thought to myself. But alas, I was sorely mistaken.

Half an hour later the fish had barely budged, it was still circling stubbornly below, it’s shining silver flank only just visible. We had tried a number of boat maneuvers to try and lift it from below, but nothing seemed to be working and I was becoming increasingly desperate as a result. If tuna had a middle finger, I have no doubt that this one’s would have been directly pointed at me. It was now an hour and 40 minutes into the fight and our ideas were drying up. ‘Ok’, I said to myself, ‘it’s time to go’. I gritted my teeth and pushed the lever drag up to maximum sunset (~5.5kg of drag) and went for broke. What happened next changed my view of sunset drag forever. I leant back on the rod and contrary to my expectations, the line didn’t break, no line slipped off and consequently, I was able to retrieve a valuable metre or so of line back on the reel. Another stroke of the rod, another metre of line retrieved, and then another metre, and another. After such a long fight, I now found myself virtually skull-dragging this fish to the surface and suddenly, it was in reach of the gaff within just two minutes! Why didn’t I increase the drag an hour ago?! Oh well, high fives all around, a photo session and another lesson learnt. The fish later weighed in at 34kg and is still the current world record on 8kg line (perhaps a benchmark to be broken by someone else out there?).

Only a couple of weeks later we were out on the SBT again. I had decided to replace all the line on my spool again, since I figured it would have been pretty stretched out and fatigued from the last epic fight. On this particular day, there were school-sized fish of around 18-23kg everywhere, and we had little trouble landing our bag in a quick morning session on heavy gear. I didn’t put out my 8kg outfit until after we had our bag onboard, but it didn’t take very long for me to hook up once more. Given that we had our bag and this was clearly no record fish, I was more than willing to go for broke with this one from the outset. Initially, I let the fish carry on and take its first couple of runs, but then I pushed the lever up to max sunset and went as hard as I could. Similar to the last two minutes of my previous fight, this fish was literally being skull-dragged and within just five minutes, I had a 20kg SBT boat-side ready to be released! Five minutes on 8kg line! Obviously, this fight gave me a much greater appreciation of the overall pulling power of this ‘light’ line and made me think about how much I had underutilized this gear’s potential in the past, simply because I was fearful of sunset drags and snapped lines.

To prove it wasn’t a fluke, I used the same approach on a number of other similar sized SBT and came back with very similar results. They didn’t all behave themselves like the previous one did, but the longest fight I had was still only about 15 minutes long. In more feisty fish, I found that when they went for a bolting run mid-fight, it would be necessary to back the drag off to strike. But as soon as they were finished, it was back up to sunset and the hurt was back on.

I believe that this active changing of the lever drag throughout the fight is important in maximizing the hurt on the fish without snapping the line. It requires the angler to be very alert and ready to lower the drag when the fish decides to bolt, but the advantage of having a lever drag reel is that it allows us to quickly switch down to their desired and pre-determined drag settings anytime throughout the fight, perhaps down to low sunset or further down to strike drag.

This is also where the quality of a lever drag reel also comes into it. When you are in a situation where your gear is being tested to the limits, the last thing you want to happen in the middle of a fight is for your pre-determined drag settings to be altered without you knowing it. As many of you might already know, physics will tell you that the amount of drag being pulled from the reel will inevitably and unavoidably increase as line empties from the reel and the diameter of the spool decreases. In these situations, it is always recommended to back the drag off slightly (to strike or below) to compensate for these increases in drag (as well as to compensate for the increased strain of water pressure when dragging 100s of metres of line through the water). Unfortunately, these laws of physics are an unavoidable fact of life that are largely out of your control and something you simply have to adjust to. However, something that can be more easily controlled by the angler is the quality of reel that you bring to the fight.

Preparing for a long and extended fight when you need the drag to be regularly working within the sunset zone is a hell of a lot of pressure for a little piece of machinery to withstand over long periods. As a result, poorer quality reels with lesser quality drag designs are much more prone to let you down in crucial moments of the fight because of a fatiguing drag system (e.g. overheating, cheaper drag plates, inferior design, etc). Drag failure doesn’t always mean that the reel completely seizes (although this can happen of course), but failure can also mean that you’re pre-determined settings may gradually be increasing throughout the fight without you knowing about it. So say for example that you have been hooked up to a barrel on a 24kg outfit for an hour, you have the lever drag up to sunset (let’s say 15kg of drag), but then the fish suddenly makes a rapid bolt towards the ocean floor. You do the right thing a back the drag back to strike point, but rather than the 8kg of drag you are expecting, you cop 12kg of drag instead! At this time you won’t have time to have worked out what is happening, the fish has bolted, the line has parted, and you are left to stew in your misery for years (or decades) to come. Maybe it would have been worth paying a few more hundred for a Tiagra after all?

Of course, the situation is never as black and white as this. There will still be plenty of times where the drag on a TLD will hold up admirably and will catch you a giant. However, just like those 20kg fish I was skull-dragging in on 8kg line with a nearly locked up reel, you need a very high level of confidence in your gear to want to do this, particularly with a fish-of-a-lifetime. And this is what I think good quality and well-prepared gear offers you the most – the psychological confidence to go for broke and as a result, the ability to maximize your gears potential and minimize the risk that you’ll lose the fish. This includes not only reels, but also the rod, line, gimbal setup, terminal connections, everything. I think I’ve offered enough suggestions in regards to reel choice, but I will cover the other components in my subsequent posts.

Wolly Bugger
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Re: work in progress

Post by Wolly Bugger » Thu May 18, 2017 6:18 pm

ncr1 wrote:Applying the Pressure

In my last post I emphasized the need to maximize the amount of drag that your outfit can handle. But what about you? Are you, the angler, capable of consistently maintaining maximum drag pressure (e.g. 20kg+ drag on 37kg line class) over an hour or three of fighting a big fish? And can you do this comfortably without breaking your back or giving yourself a hernia?

These questions go well beyond how physically strong you might be - it would be nice to be built like Schwarzenegger when fishing with 37kg gear, but I certainly don’t believe it to be an overriding requirement. Hopefully this post can provide some convincing evidence to back up this claim. I believe that with the right combination of a well-designed rod and harness system, along with an excellent fighting technique, can more than compensate for a lack of sheer brute strength. So what does a comfortable fight with 37kg tackle look like?

Before I begin, I need to specify that this discussion will be based entirely on standup gamefishing. The use of game chair is a different kettle of fish (excuse the pun) and I have virtually no experience in this regard.

Firstly, imagine an old-fashioned game of tug-of-war between two teams of people. The team who initially gain the advantage will generally be those who are able to stand up with a straight back. Preferably, they will even be able to lean back against the pull of the rope once they gain extra leverage on their opponents. In contrast, the team on the other side will generally be struggling to stand up straight and will begin to be bent over forward, making it very difficult for them to recover from that point on. A similar thing happens when fighting a big fish on heavy standup gear, the anglers who find themselves bent forward and are leaning on the gunnels are going to have a far more difficult, painful and prolonged experience than those anglers who are able to lean back consistently on the fish, or at least maintain a straight-backed stance throughout the fight. To demonstrate these differences, I have tracked down a pair of YouTube videos of separate barrel fights that I think make a nice comparison of what ‘to do’ and what ‘not to do’. Spoiler alert – both videos end up with the fish being landed, but the contrast in fish size and angler effort presents like chalk and cheese.

The first video shows YouFish TV’s Brendan Wing (Winga) fighting a SBT barrel out of Eaglehawk Neck in Tassie. It shows him hooked up on 37kg line class using a top-of-the-line, fully-rollered 37kg Shimano Tiagra standup game rod attached to a Tiagra 50W reel. Winga indicates early in the video that he is fighting with 12.5kg of drag, but I’m unsure whether he increases the drag later in the fight. Winga is an experienced gamefisherman and is also a very, very big guy. Yet, what you see throughout much of the video is Winga regularly bent over the gunnel and struggling to lean back on the fish. He manages to gain some leverage at points (see 8:30 and 16:10), but spends much of the fight with his back forward and his hands leaning on the gunnel (see 09:30 onwards). In the end, he lands a 98.6kg SBT after what appears to be at least an hour of fighting time. There’s no doubt that this is an impressive capture, but it still only equates to a ~2.7:1 ratio (fish weight: line class), basically equivalent to a 22kg fish on an 8kg line class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pgJL3lbgkQ


Contrast Winga’s fight with that of the next video. This one depicts a relatively small guy called Kilsong connected to an estimated 900lb Atlantic Bluefin Tuna off Prince Edward Island in Canada. Like Winga, he is also using 37kg line, but has a much more flexible and longer rod (custom Black Hole) (cue some jokes about this sentence…..). What follows is probably the best demonstration of standup gamefishing technique that I have ever seen. Compared to Winga’s 12.5kg of drag, Kilsong begins the fight at 20kg of drag and then increases the drag even more throughout the fight – this is some SERIOUS drag. And when you look at the bend in the rod, particularly at 06:00-06:30 and 08:00-08:30, you can really see the hurt that he is able to put onto the fish. Since the overall outfit is well designed and setup correctly, Kilsong never appears to be flustered and is able to lean back, or at least maintain a straight back, throughout the majority of the fight. The guy even has time for a beer mid-fight! In the end the massive fish is brought boatside and is released after only 55 minutes of being hooked!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_hNE5mki9k&t=512s

So there you have a comparison between a big guy, fighting 12.5kg of drag, and taking more than an hour to land a 100kg tuna, versus a much smaller guy, fighting 20-25kg of drag, and taking less than an hour to land a ~400kg tuna. The difference in outcome is simply astounding! Kilsong’s giant on 37kg line equates to a 11:1 capture ratio – Winga would need to have caught his 100kg barrel on 8kg line class to supersede that! It’s amazing to see what can be achieved with maximum fighting drag and the right gear and technique.

Clearly the outfit and setup you use can have an enormous bearing on the overall outcome of a fight with a barrel. So when it comes time to choosing the gear for this purpose, many anglers may simply decide that they want use heavier gear, like the 24kg line class, or if they want a bit more ‘security’ they may opt instead for a 37kg outfit. For a tackle store attendant, it then becomes a pretty easy task of guiding the requesting angler to a rack of equipment containing the 24kg or 37kg ‘rated’ gear, offer some broad advice on what each of the specializations offer (e.g. roller guides vs fixed guides; straight or bent butt; etc.), perhaps let the angler hold the rod while he puts a working bend in it, and then finish the selection process by determining what brand/model fits within their budget. But it is in these situations that I believe that far too much trust and reliance is being placed on the line-class rating that is affixed to the rod. Instead of choosing a specified line class and then selecting rods that are rated within that category, your first decision should instead be based upon what will be the maximum amount of drag you wish to fish with (e.g. 15kg drag). The line class rating is then basically irrelevant, since you are now only hunting an outfit that can properly handle 15kg of drag, not only with reliability (i.e. that’s it is not going to snap), but also one that you are able to maintain a very comfortable stance when connected to this level of pulling power. Both 24kg and 37kg ‘rated’ rods should have the capacity to handle 15kgs of drag easily, but you will probably find that the more flexible 24kg rod will offer you a higher degree of comfort and give you more of an opportunity to have a straight-backed/lean-back stance. When fighting his barrel using 12.5kg of drag, Winga would have almost certainly have been much better off if he was connected to a 24kg-rated rod instead of a 37kg-rated equivalent, even if the reel was spooled with 37kg line. Afterall, it’s not the line class the rod responds to, it’s the drag load.

However, in some situations, you might find that within the rods that are available on the rack, none of them allow you to properly/comfortably lean back on 15kg of drag. In this scenario, you have a few options. First is to reconfigure the way you strap yourself into your harness system (e.g. have the gimbal sitting more towards the knees) to see if you can gain any increases in your leverage capacity. Second would be to simply lower your expectations and choose a lighter drag setting to fish with. And third would be to find an increasingly sophisticated rod design to fish with. For example, as Frozenpod pointed out in another thread, adding a bent butt to your rod could increase your leverage significantly and that may allow you to go from your personal limit of 12kg of drag, to now being able to comfortably handle 15kg of drag. However, the addition of a bent butt can make the rod more awkward and cumbersome to use when not fighting fish, and sometimes requires redesigns of the boat’s rod holders to be able to accommodate them. They also cost more, possibly leaving them outside your budget. Any aspects of rod design that increases the overall drag pulling capability, will often increase the overall cost of the rod, but will also likely be detrimental to other aspects of the rod’s normal, non-fighting duties. Unfortunately, everything to do with rod design/selection is a compromise. Therefore, in the next section I will discuss what I believe are the pros and cons of each aspect of rod design.

Wolly Bugger
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Re: Article; Portland Tuna- What I've Learnt

Post by Wolly Bugger » Sat Jun 03, 2017 6:12 am

ncr1 wrote:Like FP was suggesting, it really depends on whether your setup will enable a kidney or back harness. If no, you're going to have to rely on a lot of hand and arm strength and therefore, where the reel is positioned is very much a personal choice based on what gives you a comfortable grip of the foregrip above the reel.

On the other hand, if you are setup with a harness, the reel represents the connection point where the kidney/back harness straps are connected to the lugs on top of the reel. When fighting a fish, there shouldn't be any great need to hold the foregrip at any time, it's just a matter of leaning back and using the weight of your body against the pull of the drag/fish. And here is where you have a 'lever' situation where the connection point acts sort of like the fulcrum, and an increased length of the rod butt below the fulcrum allows you to lift heavier weights. I hope that makes sense, but I'll detail it more in the next post.

If you take a look at Kilsong's setup in the second video, you can see that he has the gimbal right down towards his knees, almost as far as it will go. He also has the reel sitting right in front of his vision allowing him to comfortably wind the handle, adjust the drag and evenly distribute the line on the spool. It takes a longer rod butt than usual to achieve this positioning.

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