May 23, 2023 — On commercial fishing vessels, winches and booms are important for bringing products aboard. On the most basic level, a reel is a winch, and a rod is a boom, and that’s all bluefin tuna fishermen use when landing fish that can weigh more than half a ton.
With valuable fish on the line, literally, the equipment needs to be the best, and the choice of many champions these days are the Reel Easy, Trident 80-130 rod, and the Alutecnos, Albacore 130 2-speed reel.
Jeff Fontes and his father started building Reel Easy rods around 15 years ago, and as Fontes explains, the rods they make are the latest stage in a constant evolution.
“Starting in the ‘30s, tuna was mostly a sport fish, people were chasing giants, but in the 1980s there was a group called the Moonies, they had a whole fleet catching tuna to sell, and they would buy tuna from other commercial fishermen.”
According to Fontes, handlining was popular into the 1980s, and that’s how he started, but when the action really started in the 1990s, many commercial fishermen used the Penn International 130 reel and the Penn 130 rod.
“It was 5-foot, 6-inches long, very stiff. The short rods gave you more leverage, but they had to be stiff. These fish hit like a freight train, they hit at 60-miles an hour, they feel the hook
