Kevin: When we were out with Captain Eddie at Venice, he had us start out with 80# fluoro for chunking--on 30W and 50W reels. We hooked up with 17 yellowfin and brought 13 to gaff. The Captain's plan was to switch to 60# if the tuna were shy. Needless to say, that night, they were not. I did see in a later post (September?) of his, Captain Eddie said they had to drop down to 60 pound.
Also, we were using 5/0 Super Mutu hooks, but as Rick says, in spite of our success rate, Captain Eddie did not like those hooks because of the offset. He prefers Mustads for that reason. His theory is that the Super Mutu does not always catch in the corner of the mouth, but rather catches in the throat of the tuna in softer tissue and tends to pull out during the fight. Personally, I was so whupped after my two I wouldn't have noticed if they had been hooked up their butt and came in backwards! Fred (gimmedeal) had to stick one of his hammy hands into the photo while I was pretending to hold the damned thing up for the camera.
I learned not to be afraid of small hooks for tunal. I'll tell you something else: the deckhands on the Big E had some rigs made up with little bitty circle hooks that looked like what we used to use for Rio Grande Perch with crawdads and cane poles. No joke. I was going to use one just to piss off my buddy who is even more of a believer in Super Mutu than I am. But I got bit off my a barracuda and didn't want to take the time to go back for another. So I tied on another 5/0 S.M. and caught the yellowfin on that.
As to the hooks that did pull, I strongly believe it was due to heavy drag. They all happened (I'm pretty sure) to only one of our party. We had all carefully set our drags the night before to exactly 1/4 of the breaking strength of the line on the respective rigs. On my big rig with 130 pound line, the drag was set at about 33 to 35 pounds. Our one believer in very heavy drag (he's not alone among fishermen, by the way) had his set somewhat higher. Well, when Eddie tested our rigs, he laughed at all of them and re-set the drag by hand--no way to know for sure, but I think he brought mine down to about 20 pounds. Five fish were caught on that rig including my two, and I firmly believe our high success ratio was due to those lighter than usual settings. The member of our party who had the pulled hooks (he did really well on several other fish, let it be said), pushed his drag up pretty high when the Captain wasn't looking! Of course we were on a 36 foot boat with only 5 fishermen and could afford to spend a little time on each fish. Nevertheless, I copied those lighter settings on the Big E and caught my 75 (or so) pounder and a 25 pound AJ without too much trouble--I'm estimating 10 minutes or so although it seemed like half my lifetime. At your age, you should have no issue with endurance, and from my limited experience, I would recommend not overdoing it on the drag. Good luck to you.
Russ
Good luck on your
