Headed out at sunrise yesterday morning. Plan was to fish 26 miles offshore at one of the seamounts call the 'Marathon Hump'.
IF conditions are right this place can be amazing. It is located in about 1100-1200' of water and this mount comes up within 500' of the surface. The gulf stream, if running in this area, will collide with this particular mount on it's west side and will push up bait and nutrients from the deep. It creates a rip and a feeding frenzy at the surface. Add to this mayhem that the prime fish area is maybe only 100+ acres (very rough estimate on my part) and most boats are trolling
Most trolling in the keys involves fairly short lines off the back but when trolling for tuna you run your lines back much further (up to 250'). There was very little courtesy extended by anyone on this particular day and I understand that is about par for the course when fishing the "Hump". Main specie targeted is the blackfin tuna, but various other species are caught as well (skipjack tuna, bonita, dolphin, jacks, etc).
You can obtain a general idea of where the shoreward edge of the gulf stream is but it is generally a day or two old and a rough estimate; add to this that the gulf stream is a meandering river of warmer water that is constantly in flux. The most recent information placed the gulf stream close to the hump but nothing specific could be found. Well on this particular date it must have been another 5-10 miles further south. We had some current but not what we were hoping for. We did the trolling thing for about couple of hours and then switched over to deep dropping. We used various jigs and tried to work them about 300' down. We also sent some live baits down to the same depth. Only fish we saw caught were jacks caught by commercial boats; they were evidently fishing dead on the bottom
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It was a rush to give this spot a try but it was not our day
. We headed north back toward Marathon and about halfway there we started trolling again. On the way out I had marked areas of weed patches we came across. Since the wind was so light, there were no organized weedlines to run. We saw some bird activity along the way and our guess was there were some roving schools of tuna in the area. They were very skittish and would sound soon as we got anywhere near them so we just continued northward hoping one of our way back lines would get a hit. My wife rode in the Hunter's 'crows nest' and did spot a nice sailfish that past within 25' off of our port side; we were not targeting sailfish so we had nothing set-up to pitch to it or attract it.
Finally we did hook up on 2 smaller tuna called shipjack tuna. Not the most sought after tuna but I understand it to be fabulous for making tuna salad and not too bad on the grill so we kept one of them:
Tuna Fishing on Hump Day
Uugh!...............................Mark
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