Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Lucky Hat Strikes Again

Nice Fish and as always great story and great pictures.

Awesome story Leighton.....thank you for sharing it with us!

Well done, Leighton!

Congrats!

Well, it’s a good thing everybody likes tuna 🙂

Congrats 😎

Beyond fantastic! Congrats!

Fantastic story! Thank you for typing that all up!

Bill

Leighton,

One of these days an EPA Toxic Waste Squad is going to show up and confiscate that Hat!

Thanks for taking us with you!

Leighton;

Great story, but as usual, the preparation & food pics are outstanding.

Jealous, man !

Yep, stole Ye Olde Lucky Hat and tried to bury it on the beach at the PINS. That damned dog was trouble from the get-go!

There is very little waste with these fish. The spoon is used to scrape the tender bits of meat from the ribs--the meat just slides right off with very little effort and is typically used in maki (rolls) or just as little bits of sashimi. When the scraping process is done the rack comes out as clean as a whistle and is then discarded. Only the ribs/rack, skin, tail and guts get tossed. Even the heads have lots of wonderful meat. Behind the removed head there are two 'cones' of meat to be had with a little knife work. Then there are the cheeks and as Capt. Craig pointed out, the collar, or 'Kama', as it's called in Japan, is just wonderful grilled. Maguro (tuna) kama and hamachi kama are my favorites. I'd post a pic but crappy PB is down again.

Thanks for all the nice comments, y'all. Life's supposed to be fun, right?

CFT: last week's fish was larger than the one in my avatar, which if I recall correctly was 59" and around 150 lbs.

Wash the hat? WHAT? Sacrilege! When you wash a lucky hat or other garment you wash the luck right out of it. Everyone knows that and would be a big mistake! Preposterous? Yep. But that thing's not getting washed. Ever.

I thoroughly enjoyed your write-up and the pictures are outstanding! Tuna is a favorite of mine but I've only had Ahi/Yellowfin - it sounds like Bluefin can get considerably larger. As to tablefare - how do they compare?

Like was already stated, you raise the bar with each adventure. Thanks once again for sharing.

Giant bluefin over 1000 lbs are fairly regularly caught around here and points north well into Canadian waters. I know of two granders and heard of a third that was caught this commercial season in local waters. Here's the 40 year old world record: can you imagine hooking into this?

https://www.marlinmag.com/bluefin-tuna-record-revisiting-history/

We have a robust yellowfin fishery here too, but mostly well offshore. They're rarely taken in the bay, where lots of bluefin are often found. The YFT can grow to very large size, relatively speaking and in general, but I don't know that they get much larger than 500 pounds anywhere in the world, and I'm pretty sure those that do grow to that size are considered to be true monsters. All the truly large ones I've seen have come from Pacific waters. I've never seen any really large YFT taken out this way, but the nice thing here is that we have so many flavors of tuna. We have albacore, skipjack, big eye, yellowfin and bluefin in our waters. We also have false albacore and bonito. They are definitely not all created equal. False albacore are all but inedible. Bonito are spunky fighters and good on the table but a big one is 15 pounds. Both commercially and recreationally, bluefin, bigeye and yellowfin are the real prizes.

As far as table fare, YFT is much leaner than BFT, and is mostly pink fleshed throughout, whereas BFT has the ruby red on top and the marbled pink to creamy white belly cuts underneath. In Japan there are classes of BFT belly meat. Toro, Chu-toro and o-toro, from fatty to superfatty. I enjoy YFT raw and cooked very much for sure, but in my opinion, the BFT is and always will be king both as far as sport, and on the table.

Thanks again for the comments, gents.