How To Fish For Tuna

Hi, I'm Gavin Hodgson, fly fishing instructor and manager of Grangers Fishing Tackle here in South Kensington, London. We're going to talk you through some of the techniques and tips and help you get started in fishing. Tuna, to begin in these species, to briefly cover all of the eventualities of the materials we got, a number of methods we can use, the conventional controlling method, obviously they're going to be relying on the skipper to take us to the place where to catch these fish.

And our fish up to a very heavy duty, this is a 50 pound class, this is the outfit we use for the very bigger fishes controlling large lures and controlling the depths. Obviously, the skipper will keep you posted on things like that. So, lures such as Brito's and the red-haired 4 are popular.

What we do advise is changing travels, these travel lures are great for mostly inshore species or for your big guys, we got to upgrade both the travel hook and the split rings. Split ring pliers, obviously, you got to have that or else you going to bust every finger nail. The other methods, small lures that bring us up to surface, techniques, now, tuna are a deep diving fish of course, but they do feed on the surface.

They will follow through to the big fish and they will crash at the surface occasionally and at those times, we can use pumpers on fish and at the surface for big fish. Now, obviously, you're regular spinning off so there's not going to be much use for that one. What we got now are the heavy hoops and we got the heavy popping outfit.

Now, this rod is designed for popping but it's as strong as a board rod, it's as strong as the likes of this sort of rod but it's much more manageable outfit for people to fish. Becoming very popular are these reels now. It is the top of the range mono and the drag system on here is as strong if not stronger than most of your conventional trawling reels.

We would rig this as probably a minimum of 50 pounds of strength with a grade line. We could probably get a lot on there. Hopefully, we could get 4 to 5 yards in length to fill this spool.

Obviously, fishing with a heavy drag when a lure dives, it's going to dive deep and the flights are obviously very lengthy so you need a strong reel that's a very important part of the kit. Fly fishing for tuna is a lot more extreme as it gets, we do carry the flies, we carry a lot of bait fish products from very small bait fish products to your small species right up to very large mackerel products, some of them with tons of lures, some with hook rigs and all designed to take care of the tuna. Now, whatever method we're using, obviously landing the fish is going to take some time so it's quite a landing time and quite a tough fight and probably as extreme as fishing gets but you're also going to encounter a lot of other species at the same time so you got to go prepared.

Now, things like stronger fly lines, most fly lines when fly fishing for tuna, this is a 600 gram fly line, it's designed for that, it's designed for a really strong core so I think it's a 65 pound core so it's going to sink very fast. Now, it's not that we got to go down really deep for these fish, we got to get the fly down quick to where they are cruising and that could be a few feet down. For casting lures like flat liners, this for it to get down quick to.

Now, sharp tip is very important. Tuna don't have great big sharp teeth. Well, most of them don't but they do have great big mouths and lots of teeth in there so we tend to sharp tip it or/and fishing wire and that's important for the kit also.

Fly fishing for tuna obviously needs a very heavy fly rod, here we got a number 4 no number 12 fly rod with the biggest fly wheel we have which is a T Bolt Pacific. In certain situations, we will even go up to a heavier fly rod if you are chasing the bigger species. And in another brand, we carry a 15 weight which is obviously a board rod with fly rod fittings and designed for