The crew of the Maximum Gusto were excited to get offshore for the first tuna trip of the year. After some of the crew had been out flounder and sea bass fishing a few times for the year, everyone was excited to fish in the canyons for some yellowfin.

Originally the boat had planned to enter the South Jersey Tuna Tournament, but due to lack of commitments, the organizers chose to cancel the tournament. This meant we could go whenever the weather looked good and not necessarily on a dedicated fish day.

We knew the tuna fishing was relatively slow in the week leading up to our planned trip, but we had a great committed crew and everyone wanted to fish. Saturday June 25, 2022 we got the weather window we were looking for…light winds and smooth seas. As it turns out, leaving Cape May Inlet, it was rather rough for the first 30-40 miles on our way to the Wilmington Canyon. By daybreak, things were starting to calm down and it was looking like a nice day. 

We had the 12 rod spread out before daybreak and got to trolling. Unfortunately, the fishing was as slow as we expected. We marked little bait on the sounder and in general didn’t see much action from mammels, etc. in the canyon. The water was dirty and not the water we hoped to see. As we trolled around looking for better water in the right temperature range, we found pockets of it, but that was it. 

Around 6:30 AM we had our first bite. A 26″ yellowfin tuna. Back into the ocean it went as it was too small. We had one other knockdown that didn’t come tight and we never saw anything. Around 10:30, we decided to start deep dropping for tile fish. That proved to be a good move. Tile fishing was excellent and we caught a bunch of golden tile fish and 3 blue line tielfish.

We eventually had as many fish as we wanted and decided to pack it in and head back to the barn so we could get cleaned up and off to our next adventure for the evening.

We’ll be back soon on the edge looking for tuna. The June tuna bite has been slow this year, so with any luck things will pick up and we’ll be posting some more tuna reports soon!

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