Tues Report: Tuesday was a tuna fishing day. This was the day I've longed for over many years. I had a C-Dory 22 ft cruiser since 2003 but late last year, a lucky opportunity came my way and I was able to purchase a C-Dory TomCat. The TomCat is a 25.5' Catamaran with twin Honda 135's, and a fuel capacity of 150 gallons. With the 135's, I can get 40MPH on flat water and can generally cruise at 20-25 in typical ocean conditions in August. I finally have a boat with the range to get me to tuna and the speed to do it as a day trip.

We loaded up with fuel on Monday evening and after taking care of buying ice etc on Tues AM, we left the dock around 7AM. At Tatoosh I pointed the boat due SW and engaged the autopilot. The water was pretty decent, 4' swells at about 11s with a little wind from the NW so we made 25MPH. After about 45 MPH we hit 63 degree water just off the edge of the shelf. The gradient in water temperature wasn't great - the temp slowly climbed for most of the trip - there was no sharp edge. Four lines went in the water, all were trolling tuna clones. We had lines in the water for about 15 mins when one of them went off. Let that one take line until the reel got low hoping that we'd pick up another, but no such luck. We had 3 short hali style rods but the 4th rod was a salmon rod. Of course the fish hit on the salmon rod. After an extended battle, the fish was at the boat and I was able to hold the leader to get the fish up close enough to gaff a 18-20lb albacore. One in the boat in the first 15 mins and the first on my boat ever! It looked like we'd have a great day.

Well, we trolled for another 6-7 hours without a hit. We never saw a large flock of birds hitting the water and we never saw a school of tuna near the top. We were in water as warm as 65.3F during that time. During the troll, the NW wind had come up a bit and there were 2-3ft wind waves on top of the swell. This made it a bit more difficult to troll and reduced the ability of the fish below to see our our offerings. The 8yo was getting tired so we turned our troll back towards Tatoosh with the intention of trolling until the water temp went down to 59-60F. When we got to the SW end of the Juan de Fuca canyon and the temp was at 61F, two lines went off and we landed two more albacore. These guys were bigger both were a little shy of 30lbs. We trolled for another 20-30 mins without a hit. At this point it was around 5PM and we decided to call it for the day.

We didn't land a ton of tuna but for my first attempt, I was pretty pleased with the day. Each adult got to land one fish (the boy isn't strong enough to attempt this yet) and we gained some experience in gaffing, bleeding, preparing an ice/sea water slurry to rapidly cool the fish and cleaning the bloody mess off the deck. Here's a couple of photos from the day.

On the way out, we came across a bunch of humpback whales that were feeding. A pod of Orcas we there also and it appeared that they were competing for the same food source. There was another group of humpbacks a few 100 yds from this group and there was an Orca there too.







I only took one shot of the albie - here that is. Not a great shot - camera phone.