Top tuna sign--yellowfin clearing the surface.

Numerous blackfin tuna are caught while offshore trolling in Florida, but the potluck catch of a yellowfin is something a bluewater troller scarcely dares hope for. So if trolling is your bag, you need to seek out particular areas where the yellowfins are known to cavort with fair predictability. For Floridians, this always means a long, long boat excursion, such as a charter trip all the way to the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream out of Canaveral or Daytona Beach, or perhaps a similarly lengthy jaunt to the wide reaches of the Gulf out of a port in the Panhandle.

The only other option, even longer but perhaps more comfortable, is to hop a plane for The Bahamas. In spring and summer, schools of yellowfin of various sizes roam nearly the entire length of the eastern side of the islands, and much of their preferred territory is convenient to towns or resorts that offer the boats and crews to go after them.

Fortunately, though, trolling is not the only way to seek your tuna, and in Florida it most decidedly is not the best way. Charter skippers working the Upper and Central Keys long ago discovered that you don’t always have to hunt for blackfin tuna because, if you know the secret, they will eagerly come to you. The secret (poorly kept) is that you must seek them at the right time and in the right places, and offer them a temptation they simply can’t resist. The right time is winter and spring; the right places are a set of offshore seamounts or “humps” between Key Largo and Marathon; and the irresistible temptation, as you can probably guess, is a steady supply of live chum.

The most productive gear for chummed blackfins is spinning tackle with 12- to 20-pound line, baited, of course, with the same silvery pilchards that also do duty as chum. But with their appetites turned on, blackfins also eagerly attack artificial lures, including streamer flies.

The same basic approach gradually spread to the Lower Keys and to some mainland areas. And a big bonus developed down that way, too. In the early 1990s, the tuna-chumming hotspots—located a considerable distance west of Key West—began producing consistent numbers of yellowfin tuna along with the blackfins, bonito, yellowtails and other species that flocked to the steady stream of chum.

Even though blackfins still romp those waters between November and May, the yellowfins faded out after a few wild years. Capt. Ralph Delph of Key West thinks their decline might have been due to heavy hook-and-line commercial fishing by locals. But maybe there are other explanations. After all, yellowfins are prolific breeders and constant wanderers, and so more might well find their way back to the Key West grounds in coming years.

That’s just what seems to have happened off the southern mainland coast. Capt. Bouncer Smith of North Dade says his home waters also enjoyed a long hot streak before yellowfins virtually disappeared during the 1990s. And then, this past winter and spring (2004-2005), they began returning in encouraging numbers, if modest size.

Captain Dennis Forgione, who also works out of Haulover Inlet in North Dade, gives an enthusiastic endorsement to that view, noting that his anglers boated seven yellowfins last April.

Although live-chumming for blackfin and yellowfin tuna has long been established as a bread-and-butter approach for many Florida anglers out of many Florida ports, the system seems to have been originally developed in Bermuda, where commercial fishermen using 100-pound-test handlines started the ball rolling on the Challenger Banks sometime in the 1950s. If any fisherman ever did lose his arms to a tuna it would have to have been one of those guys, because they were occasionally compelled to wage mano a mano warfare with yellowfins that exceeded 200 pounds.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Bermuda publicist Pete Perinchief coaxed many Florida light-tackle anglers to the Challenger Banks to live-chum for tuna. But whether it was the Bermuda influence that led to the development of the Keys fishery, or whether our fishery just made its own way, is now a fuzzy subject.

Anyway, that’s the history lecture for today. As for a fishing lecture, there’s probably no better advice than to heed the warning once given in Kenya to would-be lion hunters: Before you go hunting for a lion be very sure you want to find one!

The same could be said of tuna. Of course, if you find a lion you might really lose your arms, whereas if you find a husky tuna you’ll probably get to keep them. But in either case, they’re going to feel like they’ve been thoroughly chewed on.