From Italy, 26th April 2015 [Giulio Zandri and Michele Meggiolaro]

The Spring time is going to end in Italy, in a couple of weeks Bluefin tunas will start their spawning time and for some weeks the topwater activity will be over.

Me(Giulio) and Michele, with four  other great friends, decide to go out for an offshore run with 2 different boats in an area 36 miles away in North-East direction. We were on about 30 meters of water.

We reach the spot and we find tunas very aggressive : they are not in big groups, just 1, 2 maximum 3 fish together that irrupt on the surface for a couple of times and then disappear.

But if you had a chance to cast near them, they were very sensible to lures and make great run to attack them.

On the other boat Alessandro got the first bluefintuna on the Surfish Paulownia in the blue/silver color, a beautiful fish estimated about 60kg. After a while Michele had  first a beautiful attack 3 meters away from the boat, but the hook didn't set, and again another great attack without hooking up the fish, Michele was using the silver-pink one.

Michele that was on the other boat told me on the radio about the numerous attacks on the Surfish paulownia that they were having and I decided to cast it too. I choose the silver-blue one, and at the first cast on a group of 4-5 fish we encountered I hooked up !

It resulted in a beautiful very strong fight of about 10 minutes, that gave us a 45kg tuna that has been immediately released back to water.