Beach Haven Tuna Open leaderboard shows Reel Fisher’s in bluefin lead

Reel Fisher’s 75.5-pound bluefin put the Beach Haven Tuna Open leaderboard into clear focus, with Craftsmanship at 123.1 pounds for the heaviest two-tuna stringer and Outnumbered at 162.6 pounds for the heaviest three-tuna stringer. The board looked less like a giant-fish parade and more like a live read on a working June tuna bite, with the bigeye, yellowfin and longfin divisions still empty in that snapshot.

That mattered because the 6th Annual Beach Haven Tuna Open, which ran June 13 through June 20, was built around flexibility and fast adjustments. Boats were allowed to fish any two of six available days, back-to-back days were permitted, crews did not have to return to port between those days, and there were no fixed lines-in or lines-out times. The captain’s meeting was set for Saturday, June 13, at 8 p.m. at the Beach Haven Marlin and Tuna Club, 420 N Pennsylvania Ave in Beach Haven. The club says it has 75 years of fishing history, and the tournament’s format showed that experience in the way it let crews chase whichever bite was actually building.

The official dashboard listed a purse of $209,595, 64 boats and 82 total catches at the snapshot, with eligible species limited to bigeye, bluefin, longfin and yellowfin. For anglers reading the boards as a live weather report for offshore fishing, the key detail was not just who was ahead, but what was missing: no results in the species divisions beyond the bluefin-led top fish, which suggested a competitive but relatively modest mix of tuna rather than a runaway barrage of big yellowfin or bigeye.

The comparison with 2025 sharpened that picture. Last year’s Tuna Open featured the club’s largest prize pool to date at $188,425, and a 2025 dashboard snapshot showed 66 boats, 108 total catches and Doctor Bones leading heaviest tuna at 224 pounds. Against that backdrop, the 2026 board showed a smaller top fish but a larger purse, a sign that the event’s prestige stayed strong even when the fish on the scales were smaller. The Beach Haven Marlin and Tuna Club, which also runs the long-standing Beach Haven White Marlin Invitational, has made the Tuna Open part tournament, part fishery snapshot. This year, the snapshot said enough on its own: bluefin were the fish to beat, and the rest of the board was still waiting for a heavier answer.