For the first (but hopefully not the last) time this year we have had reports of four of our bluefin tuna fleet from the Cork coast catching, tagging and releasing bluefin tuna this week as part of the Tuna CHART Programme.

Mark Gannon from Courtmacsherry Angling, Tom Collins from Sea Angling Charters, Dave Edwards from West Cork Charters and Adrian Nowotynski from Irish Deep Sea Charters all managed to get a bluefin alongside the boat this week; it was the first fish for some of the skippers after a number of previous attempts so it is great to see the effort and expense of targeting these underwater leviathans start to pay off.

The video below shot by David Norman aboard the Silver Dawn shows how easily a tagged tuna swims away from the custom made lip and grip tailer they use when tagging the fish alongside the boat.

In Donegal Bay the bluefin are still coming in thick and fast for skippers based on both sides of the shore. Ewings Sea Angling and Boat Charters and Kiwi Girl on the Sligo side have both been amongst the fish when the weather allowed while, from their Donegal bases, both Tuna.ie and Wildatlanticwayangling have also had a busy week.

Adrian Molloy shows us again this week what a skipper’s eye view of a big bluefin busting out after one of Deep Blue’s muppets looks like in the clip below – smashing stuff.