Exodus Fishing

A lesson in bluefin tuna fishing 👇

3 key stages when you’re catching and releasing a giant bluefin tuna:

1. The strike
2. The fight
3. The revive

Stage 1’s importance is clear. We use a mix of Atlantic and Mediterranean mackerel to get our strikes. The trick is to spend that extra 15-30 minutes fishing for bait so that you’re happy with the bait you get. We always look for strong mackerel which thrash around and make lots of noise. If you settle for inferior, weaker or wounded bait, you slash your chances of a strike ❌

Stage 2 is the fight. Here is where we use our Axiom Pro 2 to show us where the fish is. We could see it was at about 120 metres and quite close to the bottom. This runs the risk of the line being cut on a rock formation so we had to apply extra pressure to get this fish up and save it ✅

Step 3 is arguably the most important. So many people fight a tuna, cut the line and let it go with hook and all. That is sometimes inevitable because of the way the fish comes hooked, but most times you should remove the hook, and troll the fish until it regains its strength. That’s exactly what we did here with our gaff and it ensured that the fish swam off healthily and ready to fight another day!