Heretical Kayak Trolling For Skipjack Tuna, Giant Trevally and Kahawai

Introduction

It took me a fair while to become proficient at catching skipjack tuna and GTs, but now I almost never fail to catch these species when I target them. People will tell you kahawai ("sea trout" to the Aussies) are easy to catch and will take just about anything, but that's only half true. Sure, you'll catch the naive individuals, but if you can target the wise ones too, then you double your success rate, and when you're kayak trolling you need all the advantages you can get - speed is not in your favour on a kayak. Here are my heretical tips that never let me down. A few of these ideas fly in the face of what you've probably heard, so you can take it or leave it but maybe something will be useful for you. Not only will you catch more fish, but you will save a pile of money. Most of these tips apply to other predator species too, and I also pick up needlefish, barracuda, bream, coral trout and others, but I don't really target those.

Eyesight

As predators, these fish all have acute vision and the wise fish will shy away from anything that looks out of whack, particularly in clear water. Swivels, hooks and badly swimming lures will give the game away to a wise fish. You can get away with this more when you're trolling at faster speeds in a boat because water turbulence and prop wash helps obscure things, but at kayak trolling speed you need to be fastidious about the tells. People spend a small fortune on detailed, realistic lures but they often sit badly in the water at kayak speed or have protruding hooks and swivels. Heresy one: You don't need fancy lures - you need to hide your hooks and swivels from eagle-eyed fish. Never, ever use clips. A fisherman's knot is fast to tie and even faster to untie by sliding it open with your fingernail. Practice it! Cut your knot tag ends on the lure short.

Lures

	The common advice is that you should have a selection of lures and if one isn't working you switch to another. Heresy two: There's one lure that works every time and they're as cheap as chips. Blue and white squid skirts never fail to please. I know, I know, of course you're going to do better having a lure that looks like the dominant prey species, right? Well, they take blue and white squid skirts without fail provided you follow these tips. Blue and white is just generically fishy. The other coloured squid skirts are next to useless in comparison. Use 13 cm or 15 cm skirts for these species.
	You need to put a sinker in the head of the skirt to make it sink a bit and move like a fish. 10 g for a 13 cm skirt, and 15 g for a 15 cm skirt, or thereabouts. These olive-shaped sinkers work best but two smaller, round sinkers also works. Snip off the top of the skirt as little as possible to reveal the hole, feed your trace through the hole, then through a sinker and tie the hook on behind with a fisherman's knot. With the line held taught, massage the sinker up into the skirt head, where it will stay aligned with the hole in the skirt.
	You want to get long shank hooks like these. Note the eye is in line with the shank, rather than at an angle to it. You want a narrow hook so it can be hidden within the skirt. Something like a 4/0#, about 15-18 mm wide.
	Don't get these expensive weighted hooks. Not only is there no way to run the line down through the center, but they set the hook out to the side where it's visible to the fish, and they are unbalanced, causing poor swimming action.
	Note that most of the fancy lures have the hook protruding above or below the lure. Squid skirts are better, because they hide the hook. Fish can see your hooks at kayak trolling speed! If you need a bigger hook for bigger fish, you also need a bigger skirt to hide it, but if fish are throwing your hooks try closing up your hooks a little before resorting to a larger hook.
	When putting your lure in the water, skew the hook slightly in the knot so it sits fully within the skirt, as shown in this superimposed image.
	Make sure none of the skirt tails are tangled over the hook to ensure they all flow well or you really will catch nothing.

Traces

Your traces need to be at least 6 m long and ideally 10 for skippies, before you connect a swivel. This ensures the swivel is far enough ahead of the lure that it won't freak the fish out. They may well take it on a shorter trace but if they can see the swivel, they will be more wary and you'll get less strikes or less enthusiastic strikes. Short traces dramatically reduce strikes by skippies. Traces should be as light as possible for the size of fish you are expecting. 15 lb should be adequate.

HOWEVER, long traces cause a problem because you can no longer wind your line in entirely due to the swivel reaching your rod tip well before the fish is in. You then either need to land the fish by hand or ditch the rod altogether.

Rods and Reels

Heresy three: Hand reels are better than rods! The best trolling position comes from having your line low to the water, which is exactly the opposite of what a rod does. OK, sure, if you're fishing for big game a hand reel is a real challenge but we're talking about kahawai, GTs and skippies, which are all easily manageable with a hand reel. No rods here. They're bulky and annoying on a kayak and constantly getting water in them, requiring cleaning. Hand reels let you wind the entire trace in all the way to yoinking your fish into the kayak, without any slacking off of the line.

"But hand reels are slow and fiddly!" Heresy four: Hand reels are faster than most geared reels. You likely just haven't experienced a good hand reel.

These round, plastic hand reels suck very, very badly. The winding area is so narrow you frequently miss and lose line tension. The versions with an inbuilt winder are flimsy and it's still easy to slip off sideways.

These wooden reels are really effective. You can wind them in as fast as greased lightning without missing a beat. More importantly you can hold this in one of the hands you're holding the paddle with, and each time you paddle it releases one loop of line so you get a well-controlled release - no more paddling a few meters, dropping some line, paddling again, etc. You can also latch the line at any position by passing it through and over the end of the reel so you don't need to release the entire reel before you put it down and jump to trolling speed. They are also pretty easy to make from scrap plywood.

Making the hand reel

	Without going into too much detail, just get two scraps of 5/8 inch or 15 mm ply (marine, ideally). The reel is approx 25x16 cm. Trace out the shape of the reel and cut with a jigsaw. You can then laminate them together with marine epoxy, OR...
	screw them together with 314 stainless screws. Then it's just a case of rasping and sanding it smooth and round. You want to make it as thick as possible while still being able to hold it comfortably. If it's too thin it can cause permanent kinks or waviness in your line. 25 mm (1 inch) is a little too thin, hence using two pieces of 15 mm ply.

For skippies you want about 80-100 m of 30 lb line on the reel, not including the trace, but 40 m is enough for kahawai and GTs. When your kayak travels near fish it spooks them for a while, so a longer line means more time for them to settle before the lure travels past them.

Tie the line on to one end of the reel with a half hitch followed by a fisherman's knot.

On one side of the reel tie 2.5 m of 6 mm bungee cord using a half hitch followed by a fisherman's knot. This will be the side of the reel you hold on to. Tie it out of the way of your grip area. Tie the other end of the bungee to your kayak using the same knot. Make sure these knots are good and tight.

Using the hand reel

Check your lure is sitting nicely and the hook is hidden, then lower it a few meters into the water. Now hold the reel in one hand along with the paddle, and each paddle stroke will drop a loop of line into the water. You want to have the reel sitting above or on top of your hand when holding the paddle to let it spool out. Once you've spooled out the line, just tuck the reel under your leg/knee so that it can pull out if you catch a big fish. Most of the time this won't happen, but if a big fish strikes, just let the reel go overboard. The bungee will take the stress and play the fish for you. There is no hurry to wind the fish in! Paddle well away from any rocks or reef you are near, leaving the reel under your knee or out in the water. This will also tire the fish out while maintaining line tension. When you're in a safe position grab the reel and start winding.

Generally you will let all of the line on the reel out. You don't need to keep any extra line up your sleeve to play the fish as the bungee will play the fish for you if necessary. If you're holding the reel and the fish makes a run, let it pull line off the reel as needed. If you run out of line, just ease the reel overboard and let it play itself out on the bungee.

Don't forget your towel! When you land your fish the best way to prevent it flopping overboard or spiking you is to wrap it with a small towel. Towels are great. Don't travel anywhere without one. You should have a diving knife strapped to your leg so if you go overboard in a rogue wave you don't lose it and still have it on-hand to cut any tangling lines or ropes. Once you've stuck/bled the fish, pop the fish in your foot well under your leg and release your line again. The loop dropping action from paddling is a surprisingly alluring jigging motion to fish and you'll often catch another before you finish spooling out, particularly if you're in a boil-up.

Tides and the Fishing Calendar

Don't come at me bro, but, heresy five: throw away your fishing calendar. It's, like, 20% true but 80% confirmation bias. True believers don't go out unless the calendar tells them to, so they don't realise the fishing is still fine. Fish do not take the day off from feeding because the moon isn't in the right place and nor do commercial fishermen. Of course tides affect fish behaviour, and tides are most influenced by the moon. Spring and neap tides are the dominant factor that alter normal daily tidally-forced feeding behaviour, so all you really need is a tide chart. The rest of the considerations tide calendars use are weak at best, and different tide calendars all disagree with each other, anyway.

The inter-tidal zone is a harsh place and things die and accumulate during low tide, then when the tide comes back in there is a rush of fish into the zone to pick over the carnage. Fish know that lower tides mean more pickings so they are more eager to feed on the larger tide swings. This sets off a whole chain of events along the shore which flows throughout the food chain. Eager fish are less wary and will more readily take your lure, so there is some truth to the idea, but it happens every day, regardless. It varies by the different feeding behaviour of each species:

Giant Trevally

The best place to catch GTs is just outside a reef/shelf on the falling tide. Small fish that have been seeking refuge in the reef are forced out into deeper water by the falling tide, so GTs prowl the reef edges on the low end of the falling tide to hunt them. This happens every day, regardless of the moon, but spring tides will improve things a bit. Troll along the reef edges just a few meters out. They will think your lure is an escaping fish and pounce on it with enthusiasm any time they see it.

Skipjack Tuna

Skipjacks are deeper ocean fish and the tidal zone has little impact on them. Bait balls are still present every day and the skippies will chase them anywhere, any day, any time. If there's a boil-up then it's game on, and boil-ups do not follow the fishing calendar. They don't go away. Fish balling can be affected by tidal flows but in practice there's no real difference from one day to the next.

Keeping up with the boil-up is extremely challenging and you really need to hoof it with skippies. Predicting where they will go is near impossible but perseverance pays off - with a bit of luck thrown in.

Kahawai

Kahawai out in the open ocean are similarly not affected much by the tidal zone and there are no bad days out at sea, except by random chance.

Kahawai nearer to shore follow the twice-daily migration of small fish like mullet up the rivers on the incoming tide, about 2-3 hours after low tide. The depth of the tide makes little difference to this movement and little difference to the kahawai. I find the best river fishing time is often mid-morning tides, which the fishing calendar will always identify as a poor fishing day, and yet catches are still great.

Don't limit yourself to days identified by the calendar. Finding days with suitable weather, tides and river levels is hard enough without this extra, vaguely effective constraint. I only fish on days with an onshore breeze or offshore breeze less than ~8 knots, swells below 1 m, low river flows and settled weather to avoid weather surprises. I mostly fish for kahawai two hours after low tide, following tides that occur between 0700-1100 in the morning and almost never go home empty-handed. Morning winds are generally more settled and predictable and this trumps any benefit of the moon position for kayak trolling.

$$$

Some people believe that if your credit card isn't maxed out on gear, you're doing it wrong. They're wrong! Heresy six: You can be frugal and effective. You can get all the gear you need to catch these fish for less than $50 from aliexpress. They have a much wider selection of skirts, olive sinkers and hooks than you find in most sporting stores, and they are *way* cheaper. Just plan ahead by a few weeks and save. Fishing is a grocery option, not showboating. It should save you money, not cost you money, or you really are doing it wrong. Don't waste your money for the sake of status and conspicuous consumption.