LANDING BIG DOGTOOTH TUNA

The list:

Heavy reels— 160g Jigs — 150lb Leader — 80lb braid — clients that fish — tides — patience

After seeing a few of these fish now, and actively targeting them on charters. There’s so many things that need to go right to land for what some people try their whole life achieving. Such powerful creatures, and once hooked take a run for the ages and often swim straight back over a ledge and DEEP.

Hearing story after story of fishermen losing them to snapped leader, snapped braid, tangled around the boat, lost to sharks, ran over the ledge and into the depths. Us guides always chatting to and fro about how we could land these larger creatures, do we just hold and let it run with heavy gear? Chase them? Troll? Jig?

A triumphant day was apon us. A few very experienced fishos had travelled from Canada aboard our mothership carrying all the high end gear, bags full of jigs and lures alike. The cream of clients, fellas that are in the know and have travelled the world on the hunt for their favourite fish. ‘We want dogtooth’.

Early start and away from the boat heading straight for the tuna grounds, always aiming to fish the right tide. We got out there and always first up we look for life, be it birds, surface bait, baitballs on the sounder.. doooooosh, we come across a decent baitball and instead of trolling around with deep divers we decide to get the jigs out.

dropping in abit of 30m of water first drop fella gets smoked by a big fish, too him for a run and no time to chase. First jig lost. Can be quite the common occurrence in some of the places we get to visit amoung the mothership.

Second drop, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz line goes running again, this time with only one jig in the water we chased the line, it was running straight out back into the deep and over the ledge. Dogggie, doggie was being screamed. It’s at these moments fishing becomes chaotic, screams of desperation, screams of excitement, everyone trying to work in sync to land the dream fish. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, line keeps running and yelling at each other his rod fully bent and holding on for dear life, i was positioning the boat to keep it away from the edge, following the fish. 3rd run, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, keep following keep following. It has to stop soon. And all of a sudden, it did. It was time to winch this bugger in, without being too aggressive on his lifts, and worked the fish back, turned its head, worked him back up the surface.

FUCK, DOGGY , DOGGY, DOGGY, GET THE GAFF! GET THE GAFF! The tuna was big, it had given up his fight after 3 massive runs. He was buggered. We got him into the boat and i have never seen someone so excited. He had landed what he had traveled the world for. His first (and huge) dogtooth tuna.

A heavily photographed fish, tuna for lunch dinner and breakfast, and a request to cut the jaws out as a memo for the time he landed one of the most sought after fish in the ocean. We’ll done brother