9/4 Tuna, Mahi, Bonito, Good!

Had a Charter for Tuna today. 3 guys I have known for years who I Striper fish with occasionally, these guys have limited experience fishing from boat, and really dont stray far from the Striper's, never targeting Fluke, Seabass or Tog. Well today, they wanted Tuna, and while the Tuna bite wasn't off the hook, the fishing overall was!

We went to the Gully first thing and fished in the fleet, Sunrise was pretty good and we put 5 Tuna in the boat in the first hour or 2 before the fleet overwhelmed the fish and the bite fizzled to nothing. Today the fish wanted the metal jig which outproduced the Ronz, and the size of the fish was smaller than average with most being under 20lbs, one or 2 were standard size 20-25lb. We also scored a 30" Albie which hit the metal jig right under the surface as a pod of dolphins swam by.

Once the bite died, we moved around a bit and didn't find much, until we ran to Coxes to fish the Windmills. I heard these windmills were pretty loaded with Mahi and Bonito, and boy were they loaded. We pulled up to the first windmill and we caught fish every cast, mostly peanut Mahi but plenty of Bones too. Easy fishing. Fast action. Lose your fish, catch another pretty quick. We ended up finding the same action on the 3 windmills we hit, easy fishing on each one, though the last one we hit dried up pretty quick.

Here's where it gets interesting. We saw the Mahi get sprayed by something, and thinking it may have been a Marlin, I opted to troll a Plug from the first windmill to the 2nd, which these windmills are spaced a mile apart. So we're trolling 5mph between windmills, eating our lunch when I see a big bubbling wad of something on the surface off our port side. Im looking at it, half thinking its a school of mackerel, half knowing it was a wad of Tuna... but as we got closer to it we saw some of the fish were splashing, big splashes, big flashes, definitely not mackerel, definitely tuna! It was fate, as the only guy to not catch a fish at the Gully got his popper into just the right spot and got an epic topwater bite on the popper on his first cast into the wad! It was sick, and while the school stayed up and continued to swim slowly around, we never got another bite from any of these fish in the half hour we tried. These fish were not feeding, more just cruising on the surface, and stayed up long enough to try a variety of lures, passing up everything we threw, several casts with no bite on the popper, we tried a stickbait and a weightless big Albie Snack, never got another sniff. Around 3pm we called it a day, everyone having caught as many Mahi and Bonito as they wanted, and bringing home the Albie Bonito Tuna Mahi slam. It was a good day, even though the Gully bite died out quick.