YFT popping , I am at a loss !

[Andy Rowe]

How did you manage to get your Gunz taken by a whale shark...cast too close to it?

Wish we had thousands of YFT around here 

The whale sharks were swimming around like giant vacuum cleaners, my guess they were working with the tuna to bring the bait to the surface. Some of them were longer than the boat which was around 30 feet. It certainly put a good bend on my Long Reef 88 .

Thanks for the info everyone.

[Jon Li]

Guys ,

Went to the same place again with Andrew , Ky n Satish . We managed to catch 19 mixed bag of YFTs n Skipjack tunas up to approx. 15 kg , no change of lures and pretty much the same arsenal except with an addition of my estuary rod + Twinpower 4000HG . Everyone managed to catch some fish and we stopped fishing early due to some of the guy must return to JKT for evening appoinments .

Lots of baits , a few more whalesharks which I managed to hook one n resulting in the inevitable bust off and lots of competitors , each schools of surfacing fish must have been encircled by more than a half of a dozen boats .  

What changed ? Not sure and I guess it's the mistery of the sea n fishing . Where the fish got locked jaw last week , this time they hit our lures with abandon .

Jon .  

[Andrew Poulos]

Which lures were the winners?

[Chris Young]

Great stuff Jon. It sounds like typical tuna fishing to me, they can be sooo fussy at times

[Andy Rowe]

The following photo shows the lures which the tunas were taking, far left was my best performer, second from left also took fish, mechanical pencil for scale and a much larger example of the raider-metal which Jon was using. Ky was using a small dark soft plastic about the size of my smallest metal. Light weight gear was required to cast these small lures to the surface boils which made the fishing great fun.

[Sachin Chaudhry]

Hi Jon.
Had that problem a couple fo times.
Sometimes downsizing worked  and at others it did not.
Two things I found that greatly impacted the fishing was as follows.
1.Moonrise. If the time is very close( a couple of days before and after) the full moon once the moon comes up the Tuna tend to switch right off.
2.At others it has tended to be getting into what we call "the biting school".
In the same area but a couple of miles apart one school will nail most lures but the next is just a lot more difficult if not downright impossible.

[Jon Li]

The plan is to try again early next week  and  that means taking a day off work , so let's see .

Jon .

[Andy Rowe]

The plan is to try again early next week  and  that means taking a day off work , so let's see .

Jon .

Hi Jon,

Awaiting news of your catch....how big were the tuna? and have any of the fundamentals changed regarding what lures they are taking??

Tnx
Andy

[Jon Li]

Hi Andy ,

Due to Monday , there weren't too many " competitors " and the fish in general are still of the same size but we did caught a few slightly fish than the trip we did with Ky n Satish .

A few multiple strikes and a lot more line breaks but managed to top the number to 28 fishes , a couple unstoppable due to a couple of guys were trying to be funny bringing 20 lbs. outfit , one took 45 minutes to land a 15 kg YFT n you can ask Adrianus ( the funny man ) who caused us missing precious minutes and did not succeed in finishing the task either .

We use slighly bigger / heavier lures this time and the YFTs still refuse to strike surface popper , definitely bigger species are around as I had my 60 gr. Duel Aile Metal jig returned with 3 dimensional bent after a violent strike .

Lost a few jigs due to hooking the whale sharks , we just hold the spool and break the line when this happened , still a few of them on each boil of tunas and must be carefull not to hook them .

Jon .

[Brock Arifovic]

Jon - souns like you had fun. Well done any pictures coming soon?

PS: Did you get my last PM?

[Andy Rowe]

Jon,

Fantastic stuff, great to see the fish still on. I may try and slip work for a day next week and have another go, I've got a few new little casting jigs to try out from smith and halco.

It's hilarious having to avoid the whale sharks with your casts.

I'd like to know what larger predators are lurking out there, no indications from teeth marks on your bent jig??

So you had no tractor inner-tube to put the 20lb crew on while you continued the chase then..



 

[Jon Li]

Hi Andy ,

Yesterday was quite different and we did not bother to catch the smaller tunas , less whale shark activities but saw a few small school of cow YFTs which were easily spooked when approached , they were eating ballyhoos and only surface very briefly making it difficult to target .

We managed to approach these cow tunas several times but I was the only one who were able to get a solid hook up resulting in getting spooled when the tuna dove to the abyss , I was using HL TN87 mated with Stella 6000FA filled with PE4 line .

Just could not stop the tuna even though I had 7 kg initial drag set at an almost full spool , tried to stop the spool by hand but by that time the base of the spool already seen , I was left with empty spool .

In an after thought , I should have used a larger capacity reel but the choise of rod was correct , HL TN87 was able to cast the 50 gr. lure a long way to reach the wary school of cow tunas .

Need to buy more PE4 line now !

Jon .

[Andy Rowe]

Jon,

That is bad luck, it must have been a real nice fish.

Seems my light tackle advice was a double edged sword, we did not see any real cows on Wednesday and after striking out personally but seeing other boats getting hits with PE3 and 40lb leaders I was thinking it might be sound.

I still have the itch, but will be tied up with work until at least Wednesday the following week so will miss wetting a line with Ky.

Here's hoping the season drags on, I did see huge amounts of bait lying in the bay so we may be lucky and I hope we can get another run together

Cheers
Andy

[Jon Li]

Hi Andy ,

The end of the month is the earliest I can go , I am off to fish the freshwater rivers of the jungle of East Borneo starting July 18 ~ 24 but a few friends are going this week and I think Adam is trying to fish on the 25th .

No worry about the light tackle advise , next time will go better prepared !

Jon .  

[Jon Li]

Hi Andrew ,

Cut the river trip short due to rain upriver , returned to JKT n grab the tuna popping outfits n straight away we went to P.Ratu , finally we got one decent size YFT n almost got spooled again with only approx. 30m left in the spool when the leader broke , had 2 more strikes but no hook up .

Thinking of taking this Friday off from the office but this depends on the availability of the boat , I predict the big tunas are going to be still there this week but not sure for how long .

Jon .