Incredible Canyon YFT/Bigeye Jigging and Popping!

[Sea Bear]

Andrew, Justin, Mark and I enjoyed a remarkable trip to the canyon last night. While the recent reports have been mediocre at best I just had that gut feeling that something would happen for us if we just gave it a shot. We got a little bit of a late start and arrived at our destination in the dark, with only one other boat anywhere close to us. We found the water we were looking for and got ourselves situated around 11pm. Around 2am the action began when Justin came tight on the first fish of the night, a 50LB class YFT. A quick glance at the sonar and I see the tuna were now stacked up from 60-120' down! I dropped my H4L Mungus down to 100' and after a few handles turns I was tight to a yellowfin and this just set the stage for the rest of the trip! From then on it was a steady pull of YFT in the 30-60LB class until a large school of 70-100+ pound bigeyes came right under the boat into the chunks and pushed out the yellowfins! By now dawn was starting to get near and we could see the bigeyes gobbling up our chunks in the lights no more than 20 feet below the boat! We quickly put our jigs right in front of their faces and we could actually see them attack our jigs while we had no more than just the 25' wind-on leader off our reel. Unbelievable!

As we were jigging up the bigeyes Mark has the idea of tossing poppers out to see if they will come up and eat it. Now keep in mind it was still dark out at this time! Well I toss my OTI Komodo out and within two pops...BAM! It's a bigeye on a popper in the darkness of the night! Unreal! This fish pulled the hook next to the boat which made for a nice release anyway as by now we were basically in full release mode after putting 11 tuna in the boat (a combination of 7 YFT and 4 Bigeyes plus releasing many others). Next up Justin tosses his Heru Skipjack out and immediately gets clobbered by another bigeye! It was crazy to think but we were literally popping for bigeyes during the overnight chunk! We continued to catch yellowfin and bigeyes throughout the morning on both jigs and poppers on almost every drop/cast when Mark hooked into the big boy of the trip, a nice 100 pound bigeye that we decided to keep as a final 12th fish. The action never stopped until we finally cried uncle at about 7 am and left the tunas biting! Final tally nobody really knows as there was way too much adrenaline pumping choas for hours on end to actually be counting that kind of stuff! We estimated we probably caught a combined total of about 40 yellowfin and bigeyes from 30-100 pounds between the four of us plus countless other hits/strikes/boils/etc. We were back at the dock by 11 am, exhausted. I've been on some good canyon trips in the past but never has it been so much fun being able to now catch all these fish on jigging and popping gear the whole time. Another great trip for the memory books!

Rods:

Black Hole 250g and 350g
JM 300g and 350g

Reels:
JM PE 5 and 7
Accurate BX500N


Enjoy the pics!

Getting ready!


YFT's were abundant




It looked like this the whole time



Andrew hooked into the first bigeye on JM 350g








Eyeball on a jig!