Tripletail
Catching Tripletail in Miami
- Peak Season: Summer
- Best Charter: Full Day Offshore
- Best Technique: Sight Fishing
- Best Bait: Jigs, Flies, Shrimp, Ballyhoo
- Table Fare: Excellent
Where to find Tripletail
Tripletail are an awesome gamefish. They taste amazing and actually fight really hard for their size. They'll take off on impressive runs, chafe through your leader, jump, and do anything they can to escape capture. Tripletail are unique in the sense that they are extremely structure oriented surface dwellers. They basically spend their lives drifting around the surface and congregating near floating debris offshore. Inshore they can be found in canals, near channel markers, and sometimes just cruising along near the surface.
How to Catch Tripletail
Tripletail are actually tough adversaries for a few reasons. One: they can be very finicky. They have good eyesight and like well presented baits on light leader. Don't go too light though... They can easily chafe off anything under 30lb fluorocarbon. In the backcountry, jigs, shrimp, cut bait, and just about anything works for tripletail. When you find a nice tripletail on a floater offshore, it's an entirely different story. The challenge on floaters isn't typically getting the tripletail to eat. The issue is usually the insane amount of bycatch in the form of bar jacks (baby almacos), trigger fish, smaller tripletail, and more. If you see a nig tripletail on a floater, we've actually found that the best way to get past the annoying fish is by pitching a whole ballyhoo. A legal tripletail won't have a problem inhaling a full size ballyhoo and it prevents the issues with the trash fish.
