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Jason,
The thing is, if you are a hardcore troller using the right stuff the right way, multiple hookups on tuna are the rule, not the exception. All tuna travel in schools, and if you are only getting singles or doubles out of most of your stops, you are doing something very wrong. That is also very common. And yes, I have the cure. It's in that book that you have and is in several other ones too.
Size doesn't matter when it comes to multiple troll stops...if the school is little guys, you load up on little guys and just shake them off once you have reached the five fish boat limit, which often happened on the first stop in Cabo and does up here and anywhere else, too. If they happened to be major units, they too loaded up. In fact, a school of big tunas is almost downright terrifying to watch when they blow up on a bar pattern! They are a lot more aggressive than the runts when they show up, the strikes are all surface ones and it looks like your wake is getting bombed! Bombs going off, people in the 'pit and reels screaming, me driving with my back to the bow, taking it all in from up in the tower and watching for that last bar to go down so I can back off some on the hammers. Exciting as hell!
Taking into account our self-imposed boat limit on big ones, that would mean if we got a sextuple (the tuna spread was eight bars), which wasn't rare at all, we'd have cut off twenty bucks worth of hooks on one big fish stop alone. A couple of stops like that and you have a small financial disaster on your hands. Plus, we're talking lures here, so each cut-off wouid mean a backup lure or a re-rig job, something you don't want your crew doing on a charter and something that you don't want to have to be doing at night, before the next day's charter.
Time and money...both important factors to charterboat operations.
Actually, we also had a lot of success with those ARC De-Hookers, which we tested for the company that makes them well before they came out on the market. Those are the ones that Guy Harvey is promoting (with no financial interest) and that NOAA has required on longliners for bycatch release. They are exceptionally good release tools and we could dump a big tuna off a barbless hook even faster with the ARCs than our other way.
The first shot is how the De Hooker grabs the hook and prevents it from re-hooking the fish when it is pushed out.
The second shot is a schooly getting popped off a bar chasebait. In practice, this is done with the fish in the water. We only pulled this one out to show how the ARC slides down and gets the hook.
The next shot is how you pinch the line against the handle after you capture it in the ARC pigtail, then slide it down to the hook and pop it out.
The last shot is a black marlin getting a two man ARC release. That fish looks tired, but it was a typical black...it was playing possum, like some of the big ones do, then jumped alongside after the hook was popped out and gave our angler a memory that I'm sure he will never forget! Me? I was up in the tower, on the hammers so we wouldn't be there when she came back down!
These things are terrific. They come in a bunch of sizes, right down to little stuff for trout, up to the big guns for marlin and sharks. They are GREAT for releasing makos, by-the-way, and even work on tail-hooked T-sharks and mouth-hooked ones too. Actually, I'd like to see them required for WSB and maybe even the T's.
Good point and thanks for bringing it up.
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