Fishing Tips: How to Rig a Harpoon | Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks

[Applause] [Music]

Captain TJ out of the Hot Tuna, and today I'm going to show you how we like to rig our harpoons and board the Hot Tuna.

So what we have here is an 8ft scourge of the sea harpoon, our Lily dart on the end here. What I like to do is take the line down to about here, and I put a rubber band. Some guys like to tape it, put tape, but I prefer the rubber band.

What we do is we just put the rubber band like that, and then we'll take our electrical tape and tape over the rubber band. What that does is put tension on the dart here on the end, just enough tension to kind of hold it in place so it doesn't come off. It's, you know, we throw and we miss, like Captain Bu Bu seems to do quite a bit.

But I also like the rubber band because once the dart does hit, go in the fish, it's just that little bit of tension that has to break, and then everything kind of comes free.

We like to take the rope and kind of lap it over each other right [Music] here. We'll secure it over the tap, and then right here we have a little kind of shackle. We put the loop in, put a little loop there, and we put that shackle down. This just basically saves us from losing this pole.

This here is the Lily dart that will go into the fish, and actually, once tension is put on, it'll kind of twist inside the fish. Um, what's going to happen now is you'll see I'll try to reenact what happens when it goes into the fish.

So it comes off, as you can see, and as the fish runs, that rubber band right there will break. And if I can, if you look here as the fish also continues to run, this line will kind of slide out and through.

Then we'll have about 15 ft of clearance between the end shackle there and the dart. So when this comes up, we can, you know, undo this, get it out of the way, and then use this line to kind of pull the fish up closer to us and get a GFF for them so we can get a tail rope on them.

So the dart is in the fish, and this line is secured to that dart, and we have all this extra line here because a lot of times when you harpoon these fish, they don't just give up. Sometimes they'll take another 300-400 ft of line out off the reel, as well as the harpoon basket.

Then we've got this poly ball kind of at the end of it. God forbid he does take it all, you know, the ball will kind of suspend. And if we broke them off the rod or whatnot, we'll still have the poly, have a visual on. Hopefully, it doesn't take it down.

I'm Captain TJ, and that's how we like to rig the harpoons and board the Hot Tuna.