There’s no rational explanation for it, but in most of my canyon fishing time, I’ve always felt like the place we set up just before sunset was a completely different place than the one I saw the following morning. Something always changes in the night. The sleep deprivation takes hold and the wrists and lower back burn in the wake of 10 hours behind the chum ladle. The place, I guess, is the same.
Thankfully, with the coming dawn comes intense anticipation about the morning troll, when we’ll put out the monster spread—the bars, the big Yo-Zuri plugs, the rigged squids, the massive jetheads, the little stuff and so forth—and zigzag back up the miles of our slick hoping for an Allison, an eyeball, a…. At first light, the last leg of a very long haul indeed, anything can happen—especially in August, when trolling is still doing most of the damage.
THE MAGIC HOUR
I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for it, but the first-light bite in the canyons is like the first-light bite anywhere in all of fishing. Granted, a lot depends on what happened through the night—whether the water you set up in at dusk moved off in the night, for example. If all the signs have held together, the thermocline’s intact, there’s bait in your slick, and you took a couple fish in the wee hours, you can have high expectations for the a.m. troll.
Dawn’s the time to put out a good mixed spread, including the big stuff that could well raise a bigeye or two, a monster yellow, a wahoo, maybe a blue marlin or a mako—you never know. Since protocol is to run back up the slick, you’ll generally head off whatever had nosed its way into the stream of chunks but hadn’t yet made it to the boat. That means you’ll be trolling through some well-fertilized turf.
For that reason, it’s a good idea to get some chum ready (or reserve some from the night bit) in case the spread gets covered up. Often, you’ll hit albies or yellows, and when the come up, you can keep them where you want them by sending a couple scoops of chunks aft, setting up subsequent passes on those numbers. If you have them, it’s also prudent to have a couple of jigging set-ups at the ready. Once you’ve gotten what hook-ups you can out of the knockdowns, the jigs will sometimes clean up what came through and missed. A bonus fish here and there on the steel doesn’t sound like much until you add up the trip’s tally: As in all offshore fishing, the highliners are the guys who wring the last drop out of every positive situation.
MORNING TROLL THEORY
There are different schools of thought about the morning troll, and of course anyone you ask will justify his approach. The myth and legend of canyon fishing dictates that you should super-size your spread, and there are certainly plenty of cases in point where the guy towing the big spreaders, daisy chains, horse ballyhoo, and outsized single lures got blitzed by bigeyes, the biggest kind of yellowfins or billfish. It’s classic big- bait-big-fish theory and it does hold up—sometimes.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a large contingent in the northeast offshore fleet that maintains a “match the hatch” M.O. When you look at what’s available these days, forage- wise—small summer squid, spike mackerel, krill, sardines and so forth—it makes an awful lot of sense to disregard the folklore and embrace an approach rooted in biological reality. That means trolling what you were trolling before you set up for the night: hexheads, small jets, small swimmers, cedar plugs, Zukers, Green Machines, clones. Green Machine daisy chains and bars rigged with smaller shell squids will provide the “big-stuff” profile while catering to the small-bait dietary preferences of most canyon dwellers.
Somewhere in the middle might be your best strategy. That is, absolutely deploy some bigger baits. Many of the troll-caught allisons and bigeyes I’ve encountered did knock down foot-long swimmers, big jetheads and bars rigged with 12-inch squids. Then again, most of my sources can cite countless occasions when a pair of two-and-change bigeyes crashed the two smallest, cheapest and least eye-catching single lures in an otherwise impressive trolling pattern. It makes good sense to mix it up a bit as you set out the dawn spread.
PRO TACTICS
Most canyon regulars will tell you tuna fishing all about making the most of a scenario when the odds are in your favor. Dawn—the end of a long night’s chunking, is often one such time. Even late-summer, before fish have really started to get into reliable night bait patterns, as they typically do later in fall, including nights there’s virtually no life through the darkness, it’s quite common to see schools of yellowfins or albies, and occasionally a little shot of bigeyes, crash right through the surface slick sometime around false dawn, even right at sunrise some mornings. Accordingly, many skippers make it a point to be back up on the troll in time for this magic hour, trolling the last of full dark right through sunrise straight back up the slick they spent an entire night nursing along.
A common tactic is to troll a few large figure-eights around and through the most concentrated part of the slick (within a 100-yard circle of the numbers where you spent the night). While some guys like to load the spread with huge lures for a shot at a bigeye first thing, most sharpies will mix things up—not all one size or type, even if one has been hot at other times. Once fish start to show a preference—if they show at all— you can start to load that type of lure up off the stern.
Jigs, both traditional diamonds or new-age slabs like Butterfly jigs, add another powerful element to the a.m. strategy, particularly as a means to stick a few extra fish every time a few trolling rods go off. AS soon as you slow the boat to fight the fish hooked on the troll, try sending a couple scoops of chum astern to keep fish that charged the spread but didn’t take in the area. Then send the jigs back into the wake and work them back to the boat, squidding or snapping and pausing at a set depth where the skipper’s marking stray tuna.
Most Rhode Island tunamen sticks to smaller lures, as most of the forage tuna are eating from 30 fathoms out to the edge is on the small side. If you’re lucky enough to already have some fish in the boat at dawn, it’s not a bad idea to open a few of them up to see what they’ve been eating, whether it’s your chum, big squid like the ones you might have had in the spreader lights overnight, on juvenile stuff. What they’ve been eating—according to size, profile or color, can help you make the best lure choices.
All theory aside, one of the constants in canyon fishing is guesswork—that is, you can’t always reason through what’s going on, so you go on your best hunches. The good news is that first- trolling gives you better odds than most other points in a trip. And—whether it pans out or not—you should launch into that last leg of the journey anticipating a bailjob, everything at the ready, sleep- deprived crew riding the sharpness of its tenth wind and a pot of coffee you can stand a spoon up in.
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