Chasing Dogtooth Tuna: A Vanuatu Fishing Adventure

In need of a faraway fishing adventure, we jumped aboard a liveaboard 32ft Luhrs owned by DropCast Fishing, but day one didn’t go quite as planned. After trolling through the islands to our first destination, the jigs went down, Coops hooked up instantly but got destroyed, and Falco suffered the same fate.

We changed our approach, rerigged and tried again. On our second lap we scored a small doggie ... and another that barely qualified for puppy school, but the rest of the day continued as it had begun.

The problem wasn’t finding the dogtooth tuna, but landing them, and the sharks weren’t improving our catch rate. All we had to show for a full day’s effort was a mauled head of one dogtooth.

The water in Vanuatu is incredibly deep between the islands which disrupts the current, turning it into prime blue marlin terrain. To chase them, we didn’t need any high-speed running between spots, we simply set a spread of lures and troll.

Right in the middle of lunch, just as we were enjoying a bit of sashimi dogtooth, a blue crashed our party. Coops had never fished with 130-pound line out of the fighting chair before, so he jumped in to have a go. He made short work of the fish and had it at the boat and released again before I had a chance to get the underwater camera ready.

From there, we swung past a FAD deployed by our liveaboard owners earlier in the year. It harboured a mass of mahi and yellowfin that raced toward our lures. From there we headed north for the next set of islands.

We didn’t get far before another blue marlin climbed all over our gear, sending Coops back into the chair. He soon had the fish boatside and, jumping overboard, I was able to follow the marlin down after it was released and watch it swim away. 

Things went quiet but once we reached the islands, we barely had time to swap out the heavy tackle for some lighter trolling rods before one of the lures went off. A slab of silver appeared and a wahoo was quickly hoisted aboard, much to the delight of Coops who was still ticking new species off his bucket list.

I soon realised how many fish we had aboard but skipper Thomas Stephens had a solution. We pulled up at a palm-tree studded beach and watched what looked like the entire village population swim out to meet us.

A few yellowfin and the wahoo were passed over the gunwales into waiting, grateful hands. Later, as we sat on the deck eating our Vanuatuan curried fish, the thought of feeding an entire village with fish that we’d caught made the experience even more memorable.

The final day of our fishing holiday arrived and while we’d certainly encountered some amazing fish, a big dogtooth tuna had eluded us. Skipper Thomas wasn’t giving up easily and took us to an amazing Jurassic Park-style location where jungle-clad cliffs plunged into water 100m deep.

Baiting up a small queenfish we’d hooked up on the way, we were cruising beneath towering volcanic cliffs when the the line was suddenly ripped from Falco’s hand.

Thomas turned the Luhrs for deeper water while Falco, hanging on for dear life, kept the pressure up, cranking on the Talica like his life depended on it.

He somehow coaxed the beast of a dogtooth tuna to the surface and it was so big we had to open the marlin door just to get it aboard. Despite the euphoria that our success brought, killing a big fish can evoke mixed feelings and I was concerned about what we’d do with such a massive fish.

An hour later, we pulled into a bay and filled a smiling village chief’s tiny dugout canoe with the fish. Experiencing island life on any fishing adventure sure makes you appreciate the simple things in life - that fish fed an entire Vanuatuan village and nothing was wasted.