Skipjack tuna - fly fishing

Despite dastardly intentions by commercial operators, the skipjack tuna keep pouring into our waters, enabling Craig Worthington to take advantage of these wonderful little sport fish.

fly-caught skipjack.
The writer with a fly-caught skipjack.

The runs of skipjack tuna in our northeastern waters this summer have been absolutely fantastic. Even as early as late November there was talk of massive schools of skipjack foaming on the surface out beyond the 100m line. A couple of giant tuna purse-seiners turned up to chase them, but the reports of huge offshore skipjack tuna schools kept on coming.

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As December turned into January, northeasterly winds kicked in and the skippies moved closer. The purse-seiners kept hounding them, but the tuna spread out and were soon thickly scattered all the way down the coast.

We found them in the last few days of January thrashing the water to foam right in by Cape Brett and slightly east of the Bay of Islands’ outer islands. They were quite a spectacle. Never before have I seen so many skippies working so aggressively in one small area of ocean. Skipjack in the three- to four-kilo sizes churned the water to froth in pursuit of billions of small larval baitfish.

Everywhere we went and stopped there were these baitfish – all silver and opaque, with a head like a tiny barracouta and about 20 or 30 millimetres in size. Large groups of them huddled under the boat, and they were obviously present over a large area of ocean. I kicked myself later for failing to keep a sample for later identification.

Catching the tuna feeding on them should have been a straightforward task, yet the skippies were so completely fixated on the baitfish they frequently had eyes for nothing else. We did catch plenty while fly fishing and spin fishing from a drifting boat, but there were also many retrieves that came back to the boat without a strike, despite the lures and flies landing in an absolute maelstrom of fish.

The flies needed a bit more action in the water, while the little jig needed a better hook-up rate (not that it really mattered; there were so many fish it was just a case of sending another cast away).

We could have taken it easy and trolled flies or small tuna lures, but casting and retrieving is always far more satisfying, especially when your retrieve gets stopped halfway, everything slams up tight,and that blistering/screaming tuna run occurs immediately after. Getting such hits on a fly, with fly line ripping through your fingers on the strike and up through the rod guides, is an absolute adrenalin-pumping, fly-fishing hoot.

Spin rods tuna
Spin rods caught plenty of tuna too. Tauni Hannah hooked up to another hard-fighting fish.

Cast and retrieve strategies also tell you things about your fly that cannot be figured out with trolling. Trolling is all about speed. A fast-moving trolled fly is very attractive to a tuna, and that attraction is almost totally the speed itself. As a consequence, it often doesn’t really matter what the fly is, as long as it’s moving fast. Trolling works well, but tells you little about why the tuna hit a fly in the first place. Trolling is nice and can be very productive, but it is not fly fishing by any stretch of the imagination.

Cast and retrieve is where the fishing science is, even though the study can be intense, long and frustrating, and the learning curve steep. The ambition is always to find a fly presentation that works at slower speeds and a fly pattern that skippies will eat for its appearance alone. It’s not easy!

Even after fly fishing these wild skippy work-ups in late January, I still felt a little short of any good fly-fishing answers. A small silver Clouser, about an inch long, had caught skippies before – but this time didn’t work at all. However, a small bonefish fly that I tied on in frustration did. And on a slow retrieve, too.

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Then I tried to repeat this success, but couldn’t make it happen, so I switched back to the small silver Clouser. More rejections followed, so I cut the dumbbell eyes off the little Clouser. It was now just a size 2 Gamakatsu SL12s hook with a few scraps of tinsel attached. This worked, and carried on working, but generally only when the fly was worked as fast or as erratically as possible.

The cast and re-cast scenario became a little tiring though, and I yearned once more for a fly-fishing approach that wasn’t such a full-on effort. To cast a small fly toward a school like this, drift it into the working fish, give it a little twitch, and have it slammed while virtually stationary would be the ultimate – but at what stage do you stop catching fish and commit yourself to experimentation?

skipjack tuna churning water
Skipjack tuna churning the water to foam in pursuit of larval baitfish.

Faced with roaring walls of feeding skippies, it was very hard to start trying new things. I used what I knew worked, and used it hard. Cast, cast, cast… strip, strip, strip… fish on!

The action did, however, throw a few insights my way. The best hook-ups seemed to occur in the early part of the retrieve, when a sunk fly would be pulled sharply to the surface by the Intermediate-tip fly line; as long as the fly was well placed in front of an advancing group of fish and they were all looking in the general direction of the fly when it moved, there was a good chance of a hook-up just as the fly hit the surface. But that was just in this particular fly-fishing situation, and doesn’t mean it will work again!

Such is life when fishing to skippies: the variables are often many (such as what the skippies are feeding on at the time); the casting conditions are sometimes problematic; and the fish always have a complete and utter mind of their own. It’s a fly-fishing challenge that is rarely, if ever, going to be easy.

What is needed is a good autumn season with a good skipjack run and a strong inshore push of fish that will provide plenty of shots. Right now, it looks like we’ve got exactly that. 

   This article is reproduced with permission of   
New Zealand Fishing News

March 2015 - by Craig Worthington
Re-publishing elsewhere is prohibited

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