The year progresses onward and with it the seasons. While for the most part March has entered like a lamb, there are indications that in fact it might just be a snoring lion with some roaring soon to come. We shall see.

On the occasional recent good weather day, a few have ventured offshore and indulged in some trolling which has met with mixed results. The positive side of such outcomes is that there are some fish out there and while it may not be possible to fill the boat or even the fish box, there is the promise of some activity.

As might be expected there has been something of a wahoo bite. Normally the wintertime fish are larger than the run-of-the-mill summertime schoolies, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment.

Although a few nice fish in the 35 to 45lbs range have been caught, the norm is nearer 20lbs. There is also a long held belief that the cooler water makes winter wahoo fight harder than their summer counterpart.

There are some who argue that this is mostly in the imagination and is buoyed by the sense of excitement that comes when one gets a strike that really isn’t expected. Maybe something to do with the heightened anticipation that accompanies off season angling.

In any case, traditional trolling has got some basic results for several boats with their catches ranging from mixed bags of two or three wahoo mixed in with a similar number of yellowfin tuna, or hauls of up to five or six wahoo.

Nothing fantastic, but certainly a vast improvement on the very slim pickings that have been the hallmark of expeditions earlier this year.

As for the yellowfin, they are not particularly large, mostly school fish in the 20 to 30lbs range. The mere fact that this apparently tropical tuna is to be found on the local fishing grounds is encouraging because, quite apart from being a worthwhile game fish in their own right, they are an important food source for some of the really big game species such as giant tuna and blue marlin.

Where there is food eventually the predators will show up, so their presence must be a good sign.

One of the strange things about local angling is that there really isn’t too much experimentation. Locals read plenty of articles on new and different techniques, watch television programmes about such, and even follow such developments on the internet. Despite all this exposure, there is virtually no implementation of any of the more novel methods. Or, they get brief bursts which quickly give way to a return to the same old, same old.

Some of the commercial operators have been more avant-garde, trying such things as vertical lining and now, longlining.

Unfortunately, the vertical lining was incorrectly referred to as “long lining” back in the l980s until the early 1990s when the effort dwindled away to nothing. A vertical line was basically a trot line dropped down deep — say 150 fathoms or so, with maybe 20 hooks on each line.

For a while there was great success with so-called “red snappers” which were actually a number of species of deep water snappers and the large but not exactly delectable “John Paw” rockfish, more correctly known as a misty grouper.

After a period of bumper hauls the numbers of snapper dropped right off, giving rise to the suspicion that the fishermen were exploiting a population that had built up over years without any interference.

Once subjected to fishing pressure this mother lode was quickly exhausted and was no longer financially viable. Considering that it has been something like 20 years since the heyday of this sort of fishing, it probably offers some possibilities, but, for now, that’s another story.

Real longlining, or horizontal lining, consists of deploying a single long mainline, like up to 40 miles long, from which hooks are hung at intervals. The number of hooks varies with the length of the mainline and each one can be set at a pre-arranged depth. This is a major method used by commercial fishermen the world over and has been the subject of many topics including overfishing and other ecological issues.

It is, however, fundamental to much of the world’s fish supply.

The local fishermen using this technique are doing it on a rather small scale, but because it is an alternative fishing method it does get results. As of late these operators have enjoyed some success with swordfish and albacore tuna among other species. Bluefin tuna can also be caught in this manner and some have been.

The thought here is not that sportsmen should turn to either version of longlining, but should take advantage of the fact that these exploratory fisheries have established the presence of respectable numbers of swordfish, for which there are a number of techniques that can be utilised by anglers.

Similarly, such tactics can probably be modified to catch albacore and some of the other denizens of the deep that shy away from the upper hundred feet or so of water. Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they can’t provide some Tight Lines!