By Captain Jason Sawicki of Megabite Fishing Charters
The Atlantic bonito and false albacore are two challenging fish that anglers meet during the late season. These fish require careful approaches that differ compared to the blues and stripers that many fishermen toss larger baits to. For the educated angler, watching people frantically chase these schools of breaking fish with atom poppers and other monstrosities during the late summer and fall can be funny in itself.
Both albacore and bonito have excellent eyesight and forage on the small, micro-sized bait fish native to our area. These include silversides, small sand eels, juvenile herrings and bunkers. Showering “rain bait” is oftentimes a harbinger towards the presence of these speedy little tunas. In order to be consistently successful, there are a few tricks that need to be employed (the most important is how to identify and approach tunas to get within casting range).
Characteristics of feeding fish are different than those of bluefish or striped bass. Small tunas will slash across the surface, leaving a smaller splash than a blue or bass of equal size. When coming across busting fish, it pays to be observant for a few moments before taking action. In fact, bones and albies will certainly follow a pattern of venturing up and down a shoreline, through a current break, etc. when feeding. Understanding this and determining where to place your boat to catch a drift are the biggest challenges in hooking up.
Captain Jason with a prized Atlantic bonito.
Nowadays, we are fortunate to have light tackle available to us; used to catch bones and albies. On my boat, I’m using Quantum and FinNor spinning gear, and on the fly-fishing front I’m armed with a pair of Cheeky Mojo 425 Fly reels paired with Sage 9 weight fly rods. The new Quantum Cabo 40 and Quantum Smoke reels are ideal for handling the first couple of runs with these hard chargers. These reels can be spooled with a 20-30-lb. braid or a 10-12-lb. mono, for casting the light offerings required. Additionally, I’ll typically add 3-ft. of 12-20-lb. flourocarbon leader, whether I’m casting with braid or mono main line on my reels.
Terminal tackle for these ranges from metals like Deadly Dicks, Kastmaster spoons and Swedish Pimples to profiled swimming plugs like Rebel Fastracs, Rapala’s and Yo Zuri’s. Last year, we had great success catching albies with the new, smaller-sized SI Epoxy jigs. Additionally, soft baits should always have a place in your arsenal. On calm days, these baits will oftentimes save the day and get bit when nothing else will. My go-to soft baits include Albie Snax, which can either be twitched near the surface or fished dead-stick-style. The Albie Snax also seems to cast better than other soft baits that also work in amber, white and the herring/sand eel colors. The only problem I regularly have with soft baits is their light weight, resulting in shorter casting distance. This circles back to my initial point of having to be observant and patient to put yourself in the right proximity and situation to hook-up.
Being able to consistently catch bones and albies is very rewarding. Once you master these special methods and tactics, the same game is directly applicable to the big boys in our neighborhood when you decide to hunt school BFT’s with up-scaled gear.