I was explaining to people about our tuna setup and how simple it was to switch from salmon to tuna without changing your boat drastically and finally got around to posting the pictures and explaining how we do it. So here goes.
The tuna pole is made out of 2" Alum tubing. There are 2-pieces, one is bottlenecked just a touch to slide into the other one with a tight fit. Each one is 6' long but you should adjust yours to the width of your boat. Our last eye is just at our max reach for a handline on each side of the boat. So here is what half of it looks like on the back.
The only two things permanently installed are two flushmount scotty rod holder mounts. Here's a closeup of how it slips in...
We've welded a support bracket at the connection in the shape of a "4". We also added a little padding to keep from rubbing marks on the boat. You can also see that there is a small hole for a keeper ring at the bottom to keep from coming out of the mount.
From there the eyes are welded roughly 18" apart throughout the bar. On all of our tuna rigs we use a clip similar to a climbers quick clip and it snaps in very quickly and it's easy to get on and off. It also makes a ping when a fish hits, so it's nice to know when a strike happens. Here's that pic. We run all of our rods on top and to the side of the handlines also fyi.
Last but not least is the conversion to salmon fishing. For this we used a square tubing because it's easier to mount rod holders on the flat surface. On both ends are large squares and support brackets for the downriggers and rod holders are attached inbetween wherever you want them.
So basically with these two setups to convert from one style of fishing to the other is removing the keeper rings and changing the back mount. It takes about 90 seconds to do. The only permanent mounts are two small rod holder mounts on the back of the boat. When you're tuna fishing and running out, to start fishing it's only click, click, click... and you're in the water very very fast. It also makes it easy to change lines and vary line lengths (pretied of course) in the middle of the action. Also, storage is painless and can all fit inside the boat or in the garage and only weighs about 12-15 lbs. Anyhow, I'm sure there will be a few questions so fire away.
tc
[ 02-11-2004, 07:52 AM: Message edited by: tailchaser ]
Handline Pole for skein, pitch, and everyone for TUNA!!
skein
Linear Mode
