by Grayson Fong
After the recent round of bream tournaments, I used the break in our fishing calender to chase a few tuna off Stradbroke Island with fellow Frogleys anglers Tristan Taylor and David McKenzie along with Tristan’s girlfriend Alyssa English. As majority of my fishing is done in shallow waters chasing smaller species, it was really good to flex my muscles and broaden my piscartorial knowledge in chasing something different.
This also gave Tristan, Dave and I the opportunity to put the Samurai Reaction Bluewater series rods though their paces and they did not disappoint. We armed ourselves with the lightweight 302( 6lb-12lb), all rounder 502 (10-25lb) and the big brother 602 (25-40lb) fishing deep bommies and trolling over an area notorious for tuna and other reef species. Trolling with the 502 and 602 was a breeze with boat speeds around 8-12kph using deep diving lures with a nice quiver through the rod while in trolling motion. With hookups happening left and right playing the tuna was easy with the bottom end grunt of the Bluewater range really showing its true colours.
When we took a break from trolling and decided to sight cast at bait schools for smaller bonito the 502 and 302 really showed great versatility. Cast and retrieving larger soft plastics on 3/4oz and 1/2oz size jigheads was fun with the well balanced 502, and the 302 was awesome with for our smaller 3″-4″ plastics on 1/8th-1/4oz jigheads.
All in all it was a great chance to test our gear on some speeding predators which left us with the confidence to chase anything with the Samurai Reaction Bluewater range.