Big skipjacks also fall for the tactic.

It’s said that there are no secrets in offshore fishing anymore.

And yet this new trick seemed to be a secret that produced one of the most exciting ocean trips I’ve been on.

The bam, wham, knockdowns, blowups and hookups were fit for a Batman action cartoon.

Fortunately, I wasn’t sworn to complete secrecy and got the green light to share the method with a few thousand of my closest friends.

Young Geoffrey Campbell, mate to and son of Capt. George Campbell, had started telling me about their technique as we left Caloosa Cove Marina in Islamorada.

“We do things a little different,” he said and then looked up at his dad to see if he should continue. Dad nodded yes.

Basically, the Campbells troll a soft-plastic flyingfish, often under a kite.

“Then the secret is to attach a trailing treble hook to the bait,” said Geoffrey.

Use rigging wire to pin the stinger to bait.

He explained that they had gotten worlds of strikes and blowups without the trailing treble, “but once we added the second hook it was a whole new ball game.”

Our destination that day was the Marathon Hump, or to locals, the West Hump (24-25.504'N, 80-45.202'W). It’s about 25 miles from Islamorada, a little farther than its more popular brother to the east, but George feels it’s worth the time and fuel to get away from some of the boat pressure. Even with that being the case we saw a few boats trolling under terns and gulls as we neared the underground mountain rising 500 feet from the ocean floor over 1,000 feet down.

The father/son, captain/mate team was ready for action. Kite rod on the bridge, medium wind, all-purpose kite ready, plastic bait resting on the transom cover board prepared to fly across the surface.

With the added height of the bridge and the self-produced wind caused by the trolling boat the kite was airborne in seconds. Just as quickly the plastic flyer was lifted into the air and was soon skimming across wave tops a hundred yards off and behind the port side of the boat.

George shook his head as he watched a boat troll right through the school of fish sending the birds up and away—but worse, pushing the fish down. George says that trolling right over them is the biggest mistake people make when fishing a school of tuna. “I guess they’re afraid of missing the fish, but 8 out of 10 times, when you run right through the birds you kill your chances of hooking up.”

George went on, “The relationship of the birds and tuna isn’t complex. The fish are pushing bait to the surface where they become easy prey for the birds. If you interrupt this with your boat you’ve lost your navigational aids as well as your chances of hooking up. What you need to do is get your bait to the fish, not your boat. You’ve got to do your best to determine which direction the school’s moving and how big the school is, then you make a wide half-circle around them getting your bait on an interception course with Charlie.”

On days when the 37-foot Snapshot is looking for action, George prefers using a kite while trolling to keep his boat away from the fish and his bait dead center. Over the last couple of years he’s perfected the technique. Without a system, and a little teamwork, I could see where the technique might be more work than it’s worth, but they have it down pat.

As George maneuvered around the schooling fish, keeping his boat well away from the birds, it was up to Geoffrey to keep the bait skipping across the wave tops. To do this he kept a close watch and made slight adjustments to how much line was out on the fishing reel. If the kite rose up, bringing the bait out of the water, he simply let more line out. If the kite came down too far, or a boat-turn pulled the bait back, he’d reel in some line. Aside from these adjustments the only other minor change Geoffrey would make while we were fishing was to switch the rod to the downwind side of the boat, keeping the line from going across the cockpit.