Tuna Fishing Tactics from East Coast to West Coast

A SoCal expat compares the Northeast and San Diego tuna fisheries.

“We got em’ boiling in the corner. Change your baits. Fresh one!” I could hear the sound of heavy braid getting ripped off a conventional so fast that I was sure the guy to my left was going to get spooled. “Coming down to your right!” My neighbor’s fish immediately darted to the portside corner of the transom of the 75-foot sportfishing boat, The San Diego. This fish moved so fast that the angler was stumbling and tripping as he followed his line around the rail of the boat. Five to ten minutes later, I heard him call, “Gaff on the bow,” followed by a celebratory, “Let’s go!”

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I wound in my sardine, flicked it off my size 1 J-hook, and ran up to the bow, where a 40-pound yellowfin tuna was tail thumping and spraying blood all over the deck. A deckhand rushed over with an oversized stapler.

“What number?”

“Thirty-two,” the angler replied, and the tuna got a new eyebrow piercing with the angler’s tag number.

I noticed the sardine guts and tuna blood all over the angler’s Xtratuf deck boots as he walked back to the bait tank, grabbed his Starbucks espresso, took a sip, and found a fresh sardine to toss back into the fray. After the chaos ended, we tallied up our kill. Seven tuna landed, at least twice that many hooked.

Over an hour later, the captain suddenly cut the engines as we slid into a school of much bigger fish. Over the PA system, the captain screamed, “Huge foamer! Get the 50-pound setups out!”

Only a few anglers dared to cast a sardine at this larger grade of fish. These were bluefin tuna ranging from 50 to 170 pounds. Right off the bat, 5 or 6 guys immediately hooked up off starboard, their rods bent to the butt. The deckhand handed me a cumbersome rod, saying, “Use this, and you’ll actually get him to the boat.” I smirked when I saw it was a Penn International 30 on a thick trolling rod. The braided line felt like paracord. I quickly baited a healthy sardine and pitched it off the side, then immediately backlashed.

Casting a 2-ounce sardine on a conventional trolling rod is no easy task. Within seconds, my backlash was pulled out and cleared—not by me, but by the 126-pound bluefin tuna that slurped the sardine just 10 yards off the starboard side. Forty minutes later, I had my tuna glory.

That’s tuna fishing in Southern California. It’s raw, unpredictable, chaotic, and exciting. SoCal’s tuna game revolves around its massive party-boat fleet. These boats are capable of holding up to 50 anglers and are equipped with bait tanks the size of cars. They live-chum schools of tuna into casting range, allowing anglers to pitch live baits into the fray.

On the trip I was on, the boat returned to the dock with 50-plus tuna, a mix of yellowfin and bluefin, in sizes ranging from 12 to 126 pounds.

Following my days in Southern California, I made the transition to East Coast saltwater fishing. With the incredible inshore fishery here, I spent the bulk of my time targeting striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore. While they are fun to go after throughout the season, I wanted to give East Coast tuna fishing a go. I knew it would be quite different than its West Coast counterpart because the fish are generally bigger, plus I didn’t have access to a massive party-boat fleet. This meant I would need to use my family’s boat without help from the salty party-boat captains from San Diego.

Tuna fishing on the East Coast seemed much more cutthroat and intimidating, which held me back from attempting it for several years. However, with some tuna grounds on Cape Cod accessible to small boaters under the right conditions, my father and I, along with a good friend, decided to give it a go.

We were trolling off Chatham, Massachusetts, on a late-June day. I had given the port bird bar a quick pop to free it of the weeds being pushed in by the southwest breeze when something caught my eye. Was that a whale breaking the surface? Suddenly a flock of birds appeared about 200 yards off the bow—shearwaters, and they were working bait. I commented to my buddy, “We might hook up here next to these working birds.” No sooner had I said that, the sound of braided line absolutely flying off a conventional reel erupted. “We’re on!” I screamed.

I jumped up from the console and spilled my large Dunkin iced coffee all over the deck of the boat. I had forgotten to turn on the “fish alarm” on the Old Avet reel from California that I had repurposed as a trolling setup. This fish had dumped half of my reel’s spool in just 30 seconds. Simultaneously, I told my friend to wind in the other trolling lines. Fifteen minutes later, an 80-pound bluefin tuna hit the deck of the boat after our second gaff almost snapped. This fish did the same pulsating tail beat on the deck of the boat that I was all too familiar with, but hadn’t heard in too many years. As we iced the fish down, we learned that tuna blood mixed with iced coffee makes for an interesting clean-up process.

Tuna fishing in the Northeast is usually not as fast paced as in Southern California, but based on my experiences, there are many similarities between the two, as well as some big differences. Many people associate tuna fishing in the Northeast with the National Geographic show, Wicked Tuna—massive 80- to 130-class reels, thick bent butt rods, and bluefin tuna in excess of 500 pounds. While that certainly is a draw, targeting smaller recreational-sized bluefin and yellowfin is more comparable to what one might experience in Southern California.

While Southern California does not have the giant bluefin tuna the Northeast is known for, it does have some incredible nearshore, accessible tuna action. This access is due to SoCal’s massive sport-boat fleet, where recreational anglers without their own boats can pay relatively short money to have a chance at tuna on light tackle. It gives anglers who would otherwise never be able to go tuna fishing the chance to go out and catch dozens of them in a season.

In the Northeast, when anglers hook up on the troll, the captain often keeps running the boat at the same speed for 20 to 30 seconds to entice additional fish into grabbing other offerings in the spread. This is a very effective tactic, often resulting in double or triple hookups. Sometimes, little things like this can make or break a tuna-fishing trip. Tuna are a schooling fish and are often competitive, giving anglers a higher chance of multiple hookups occurring simultaneously on the troll.

In contrast, in Southern Californian, a sport boat typically trolls between spots, so when there is a knockdown, the other anglers drop a jig or a live bait back into the wash while the boat slows. It’s a similar mindset, with the goal being to draw in and pick off other fish in the school likely following the tuna that has taken the trolled offering. This is called getting bitten on the “slide” as the boat slides to a stop. Deckhands also often toss dozens of pieces of live chum into the wash to draw the whole school to the boat, giving other anglers chances at hooking up. I’ve witnessed this, and it’s astonishing that one fish biting a trolling feather can quickly turn into a hundred-plus tuna fish boiling on chum around the boat. These types of tactics capitalize on the handful of opportunities at catching fish so commonplace on offshore trip—trying to make the most of these chances and turning them into putting tuna on the deck, but this also fuels the perception that tuna fishing is often “hours of boredom followed by 10 minutes of chaos” among fishermen on both coasts.

If East Coast tuna fisherman employed similar tactics, such as dumping live or dead chum into the wash when getting bit on the troll, they would likely have even more lucrative results and really capitalize on those precious 10 minutes of chaos.

Fly-Lining

The most basic way an angler fishes for tuna is with a live sardine (4 to 7 inches) or anchovy (3 to 5 inches) “fly lined” with no weight on a straight J or circle hook. Most people start out with a 30-pound setup on a size 16 to 20 Shimano or 20 to 25 Penn reel matched with a 7- to 8-foot bait rod rated for 20- to 50-pound test line. Commonly, a 1/0 to 3/0 J or circle hook is used to nose-hook the sardine. For smaller anchovies, most anglers use size 2/0 hooks. West Coast tuna can be incredibly finicky, sometimes requiring an ultimate finesse “fly line” setup to get any bites at all. This means using a hook as small as a size 2/0 or 4/0 on 20-pound-test fluorocarbon leader. However, this is only feasible when the fish are about 35 pounds or less.

Surface Irons

If the tuna are “chewing” good, anglers in SoCal often throw artificials at them. Aside from the world-renowned cupped-face surface popper for tuna, many West Coast anglers choose to use the “surface iron,” a metal jig designed to swim erratically near the surface on medium to fast retrieves.

Surface irons, poppers, and other topwater lures are often fished on 9- to 10-foot conventional rods with a soft tip that can cast a lighter lure far from the boat.

While anglers on both coasts jig for tuna, there are several stark differences. First, the retrieves are quite different. West Coast anglers generally drop their jigs to the bottom or desired depth, and do a quick straight wind of their jig, then drop it back down if they don’t get a bite. The technique is referred to as yo-yo-style jigging. Anglers in the Northeast tend to pump the rod and wind up the slack—rarely do you see a straight speedy jig retrieve in the Atlantic’s waters. Based on my experiences, both techniques are equally effective at putting tuna of the same species on the deck, making me question how and why each coast’s tactics developed the way they did.

On the West Coast, anglers tend to gravitate toward a wider-bodied jig such as the Shimano Flat Fall or Tady AA, while in the Northeast, anglers often pick a slimmer-profile jig to imitate sand eels.

In addition to the differing technique, the jigging tackle anglers use on each coast is quite different. While Northeast anglers prefer short but stout spinning rods rated for heavy braided lines and jigs sometimes up to 10 ounces, West Coast anglers fish yo-yo jigs or heavy irons on the same 8- to 9-foot conventional “jig sticks” they use for topwater surface iron and popper fishing. West Coast anglers rarely use spinning reels, which many refer to as “coffee grinders.”

In my experience, conventional gear has the advantage over spinning gear when pulling on large tuna fish. Therefore, my jigging preference, whether I am in the Northeast or on the West Coast, is a conventional setup due to its power and ability to “rail rod,” if needed, which is using the rail of the boat as leverage when fighting a fish. When the boat drops with the swell, an angler can take a crank or two on the tuna below.

This is an extremely popula tactic for West Coast anglers, who often use conventional gear and have landed large fish on lighter gear compared to spinning tackle. For my East Coast tuna fishing, I have used the same gear I used in SoCal. This past season, I was able to land East Coast bluefin into the low 100-pound range on reels more suited for striped-bass fishing by rail-rodding the fish. This technique is impossible to employ with spinning tackle because the reel sits under the rod.

While the tackle and tactics differ, the love of tuna fishing is the same for anglers on both coasts, and perhaps adding some of these West Coast tuna tactics to the arsenal can help hook a few more East Coast tuna this season.

Tracking Atlantic Yellowfin Tuna

Topwater Popping for Tuna

Big Bluefin Tuna Behavior

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Nice comments, I learned a lot about East coast fishing. Thanks for sharing!

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