Not exactly fishing weather but a bit of planning and some daring-do can make for at least a brief trip offshore.

Trolling is the norm with a wahoo or two the intended target. Once succeeding, the smart move is to head for home. An alternative is some chumming along the edge but that is going to be hit and miss, especially as the tides are totally unreliable at this time of the year. Just think what the passage of a tropical storm to the east earlier this week did to the swells around the Island.

But good days do exist and there are still some wahoo out there that are willing to plies. The trick is to avoid the distractions like lobsters and to make good use of the brief windows of opportunity as and when they present themselves. Who knows what you might catch?

Over time, many of the stranger catches that have been made in local waters have come during the winter months. In some ways this is a bit surprising because the amount of effort is significantly less than during the summer and one would think that more boats would mean an increased chance of catching whatever there might be out there.

This might be taken as some evidence that certain species only stray into local waters during the so-called “off season”. If that is indeed the case, then ore effort might turn up either more of the same or maybe even other species that have quite possibly spent eons slipping through this area without detection.

An excursion offshore last week by a commercial boat that had what can best be termed a “mixed result”. The positive aspects of this included seven wahoo and a solo dolphin but it was the other bites that made for a story or two.

A strike early on in the day saw a reel taken to the heart of the spool after some considerable time at which point the decision was made to go up on the drag and to let the line part where it may. The logic here is that the weakest portion of the line is most likely to be in either the top shot if a splice is used or in that part of the monofilament that has been on and off the reel the most. Economics is at work here: at today’s prices no one wants to have to replace an entire spool.

Speculation as to the culprit was limited: it had to be something big. There are plenty of marlin that fit this category but the manner of their attack and battle differed from that experienced in this case. Their tendency to break the surface and to put on even limited aerial displays further discounted the likelihood of a billfish being the culprit.

The modus operandi was that of a tuna and with even the largest yellowfins known to traverse local waters coming in at around the 200-pound mark, their lack of sheer mass took them off the suspect list. The consensus was that a bluefin tuna had inhaled the bait and then proceeded to search for the bottom of the sea, running long and hard off into the distance.

The size factor fit the equation as did the known season when such fish might frequent the area. In recent years, a very different understanding of the movement of bluefin tuna has come to light, largely thanks to satellite tracking tags and other technologies.

In the mid-20th century, the accepted belief was that there were effectively two populations of bluefin in the Atlantic. One was concentrated in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean and the western Atlantic population was the one that undertook the long migrations. The migratory path was thought to be showing up in the spring in the Bahamas and then feeding their way northward along the American east coast all the way up to Canada’s Maritime Provinces before cold weather sent them scattering out into the open Atlantic, probably heading mostly south and west. The Gulf of Mexico was a known breeding ground so there had to be some mechanism that got the fish back down there. It was accepted that occasionally fish rather than heading south, fish might have headed straight across the Atlantic to the British Isles and Norway then southward and eventually back along the North Equatorial Current to the Bahamas region. Very nice, simple and probably wrong.

There was a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that bluefin tuna were known here from the early part of the sport fishery. Old tourist guide books specifically mention bluefin and there are still a few anglers who remember old timers talking about schools of huge tuna on the Banks during the winter months. Much of this fell by the wayside when the then modern science suggested the north-south migration.

Not to be left out of the equation, this coincided with the sudden blossoming demand for bluefin and the apparent decimation of the stocks over a very short period. Less fish meant that there was a markedly reduced likelihood of them showing up anywhere in any numbers. The almost startling lack of this species in the Bahamas during April and May was clear evidence of some major shift. In a nutshell, such fishing pressure led to new controls and a call for increased research into the life cycles of this economically vital species.

Although it took a good while, new findings were revealed and now, although many of the fisheries managers aren’t too happy about it (for political and economic reasons that will be ignored here), modern science suggests a lot more mixing between the eastern and western populations. Advanced studies have shown the fish making crossings through the central Atlantic and generally confusing the whole picture, making the layman’s view that “they have tails and go where and whenever they want” a not too far from the truth summation.

Some management success has meant increased numbers of bluefin and changes in the local fishery here have led to occasions when tunas have been encounters with some degree of regularity with the cooler months being the most likely for such encounters. Thus that is what this particular runaway was ascribed to.

To add intrigue to the tale, a little while later, a rod screamed off also bent on taking all the line. This time, however, some progress was made and the fish was eventually brought close to the boat. With the expectation of a nice marketable tuna occupying their thoughts, imagine the crew’s dismay when they found themselves looking into the malevolent eye of about 600 pounds of some of the nastiest pieces of work in the ocean — a short tempered, highly annoyed mako shark. Here, discretion got the better part of valour and the line once again parted, releasing what could have been a whole lot of trouble and bringing an end to the day’s Tight lines!!!