Anglers don’t usually associate sight fishing with deep water offshore, but keeping an eye—and a crab or shrimp—peeled can put more fish in the boat. Tripletails frequently drift along with floating debris, sometimes as small as a drink can. They hang around channel buoys and cruise weed lines. Sometimes, monster tripletails sun themselves in open water.
photo credit: Capt. Jim Ross, Fine Line Fishing Charters
Also called blackfish, tripletail range throughout the warm waters of the world. Looking something like a dark brown bluegill on bad steroids, tripletail can exceed 40 pounds. Although typically considered an offshore fish, they often enter salty estuaries where they hang around dock pilings, bridges and crab trap floats.
“The Mississippi Coast area has a great tripletail fishery that usually starts in April and runs through October,” said Capt. Robert Brodie of Team Brodie Charters in Biloxi. “They’ll come all the way up to Biloxi beach and hang around the dock pilings. To the east, we catch a lot of tripletail outside of the harbor in Ocean Springs. To the west, from Bay St. Louis to Lake Borgne, Louisiana, there’s a tremendous tripletail fishery in the summer.”
Tripletails can show up in one place today and disappear tomorrow. Because of their nomadic nature, few people intentionally fish for them. Most people catch tripletails as lagniappe if they spot one hanging around floating debris. In many ways, chasing ’tail, more resembles hunting than fishing as anglers run the coast looking under every piece of floating debris and sight casting to targets of opportunity.
“The best way to catch tripletails is sight fishing,” Brodie explained. “In late spring or early summer, tripletails start showing up around the crab traps and buoys. Run the crab pots and look in the water very carefully with a good pair of polarized glasses. Approach them with a trolling motor and cast the bait way ahead of the fish. Let the water carry the bait to the fish in a natural fashion.”
After spotting tripletails, approach from upwind, using the wind or tide to carry the boat toward floating cover. When in casting range, toss a bait beyond the fish and bring it past the tripletail’s nose. Don’t throw right on top of the fish.
Tripletails hit a variety of baits, including shrimp, squid and fish, but relish cracked crab. They also smash soft plastics, spoons, jigs sweetened with shrimp and anything that might tempt speckled trout or redfish. Tripletails readily take flies, making them particularly exciting targets for fly fishermen. If a fish disappears, drop a live bait or a crab to the bottom or return to that spot a while later.