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Fishing: How To Fish: Advanced: Saltwater
Kite Fishing: High-Speed Kite Fishing
Man, it looked fishy. The birds swooped low over the boiling water, picking up bits of food as tuna churned the surface to a froth in their frenzy to gorge themselves on schools of bait. Our captain, Billy Wood from the Class Action in Islamorada in the Florida Keys, who had joined us aboard a new Grady White 265, set the dead flying fish below the kite flying off our stern.
"OK, turn left and come up on plane," Wood said. The kite shifted out over the side of the boat as we turned, and the bait leapt off the water's surface only to splash down again some 30 feet away. As the bait crossed the boiling water in giant trajectories, tuna burst out of the water trying to crash it in mid-air.
The bait looked for all the world like a fleeing flying fish. Obviously it did to the tuna - the bait had touched the water only three times before a 35-pound blackfin launched itself after our kite bait and caught it about 4 feet above the water. As line peeled off the reel, Wood grinned from ear to ear at me, who stood open-mouthed at what I'd just witnessed. He handed me the rod and asked, "Well, what do you think of that?"
How many times have you approached a school of feeding tuna and tried to position your boat correctly to get baits to them, only to have the birds, the bait and the school drop out of sight or move in the wrong direction? Chasing birds working a frenzy of tuna has occupied many hours of my time. I've often wished for a way to get a bird to drop a baited hook into the middle of the melee. Or better still, to have one of those fleeing baits sport one of my hooks in it.
"Tuna seem to sense when a boat is coming," says Wood. "Some people think it's bow pressure, others say it's engine or hull noise. Whatever, it causes us loads of frustration sometimes."
In recent years, some charter skippers in the Florida Keys have devised a tuna-fishing method that answers my prayers.
"Skip Nielson on the How 'Bout It and Alex Adler on the Kalex, both out of Bud and Mary's Marina in Islamorada, invented and perfected the process," says Wood. "They run a kite off the side of their boat, running up on plane at 20 to 25 mph, with a baited hook skipping right through the middle of the tuna's feeding frenzy. I've never seen a more effective tuna-fishing method short of a net."
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