Red Sky at Night
As the saying goes, “Red sky at night, sailors delights. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning”.
In the days leading up to my first tuna trip my eyes were glued to NOAA weather reports and with 100+ degrees weather in Portland it wasn’t looking good for ocean conditions. As luck would have it there was a break in the wind chop and swells and the call was made in the eleventh hour we were going fishing. Heading towards Lincoln City the evening before our trip it was “Red Sky at Night.”
Don’t think I slept more then a few hours that night and kept tossing and turning with excitement and when the alarm went off at 4:00 a.m. I was up in an instant and headed for the boat dock. We met with Mike Jespersen of Nalu Charters and began unloading 250lbs of ice that would keep the days catch cold, assuming we were to get lucky and boat some tuna.
We headed out to the Big Blue around 6:00 a.m. out of Depot Bay in a not very pleasant fog bank but once we passed the whistle buoy it was throttle down and headed west. The first hour of the run proved uneventful but then we started to see signs of life. We passed near a Sun fish and then a breaching whale. The whale was very cool, I looked over the horizon and see this giant black thing break the surface and land with a huge splash followed by several spouts of air/water from it’s blow hole…I took it as a good Oman of things to come.
About two hours into the run heading west I spot these little flying finned football looking things and then it hits and I yell out…..TUNA!!!! Cpt. Mike looks to where I’m pointing and sees them too and wastes no time spinning the boat around and cuts the motors right on top of the jumping tuna. Mike grabs a rod and tosses out a jig and has a fish on within seconds and hands off the rod. Now I’ve never tuna fished before but I sure as heck wasn’t going to stand around and watch the action happen around me so I grab the nearest rod which had a rubber swim bait attached and I run up to the bow. Having no clue what to do I sort of dropped the swim bait over the edge and start jigging when Mike yells out to me, “cast it and fast retrieve.” I do just that and WHAM! and the reel starts screaming and I’m hanging on…TUNA ON! My fist tuna and it was great, hit like a freight train! I fight the fish for a few minutes and pop…TUNA OFF! The line broke. Oh, well. At least the guys in the back managed to get one in the boat. Our first fish and the stink is off.
It was a mad scramble after that with Mike running the boat to catch back up with the fish and putting out trolling gear and all our eyes intently staring at the water looking for jumpers again. It wasn’t long until a rod goes off and the audible confirmation of the drag squeeling, ZZZZZZZZZ zZZzzzzz and everyone looking around to see which rod is doubled over. It’s all kind of a blur for me at this point as the chaos set in and fish are flopping in the back of the boat and fish are being bled and blood splatter is everywhere. I didn’t have the heart to tell my friend Matt he had a big bright red streak of blood across his nose, figured it was all part of the fun and battle, getting down and dirty.
Since the four of us have never played this game before the day started off a little slow and awkward but I’d say as the day progressed we found our groove and did pretty well together. We knew to leave the rod in the holder when one rod went off trying to hook up another fish as Mike turned the boat. We even managed a “Quad” at one point hooking into four fish. That was cool, hearing one go off then another and another and another and everyone screaming “Double, Triple, Quad”. We knew how to bleed the fish and slide them into the hole then rotate it to the slurry then the ice box. We knew which rods went where on the boat and how far each rod should be let out. We were all having a good time.
After a while we had a pretty good stash of ‘Tuner’ and I asked Mike if he’d appease me and let me use my own gear I had brought. Now this gear is nothing fancy and definitely not like the $500 dollar reels and $300+ dollar rods Mike uses but the gear I brought has history. My 57 year old good friend and hunting partner, we call him Uncle Allen around our house, gave me his Penn 350 Levelwind reel a few months back and the second I saw it I thought tuna and I was bound and determine to add some ‘history’ to this reel. This reel was given to my friend Allen by his father around 1961 when the two of them would fish the Willamette for Springers. Allen’s father liked this reel because it didn’t use the back-and-forth mechanism of mechanical level-winds but instead uses a twisted guide bar to distribute the line evenly across the spool. This is an important feature when a fish is stripping line fast and furiously, less things to go wrong. Allen and his father would fish off the log rafts in Oregon City and Allen, at the age of 14, even won the Larry’s Sporting Goods big-fish-contest with a 41lb springer on this reel. It’s even been to Tillamook Bay, Buoy-10, S.E. Alaska for Salmon, halibut and Lingcod. Like I said this reel has history and I’m sure a lot of sentimental value being a gift from his father. When Allen gave me his reel I wasn’t going to let it sit in the corner and gather dust, it still had plenty of life left to it. A few nights before our tuna trip I spent a couple hours completely stripping the reel, oiled all the moving parts, cleaned everything and re-greased the drag washers. Next was a trip down to Larry’s uh, I mean Fisherman’s and spooled up 250 yards of 65lb XP braid with a 50 foot 40lb top-shot bumper. It was time to put this nearly 50 year old reel to use and give it some more memories. Capt. Mike checked everything out and tested the drag and gave the ‘O.K.’ and I tied on and old school cedar plug and let out line straight down the middle behind the back of the boat. We trolled around for a while when I suddenly hear the now familiar zippppp of a drag clicker screaming and look around in front of me at all the rods and don’t see any bent over. Then I look up, high in the Rocket Launcher rod holder straight down the middle is that old Penn 350 making music and a cedar plug buried in the corner of a tunas’ mouth and it’s heading for the bottom of the ocean. An uncontrollable grin hit me ear to ear as I tried to pry the pinned and doubled over rod from the holder. This one is for you buddy…
Overall a great day and it ended with a spectacular thunder and lightening storm that was a little to close for comfort. When you can ‘feel’ the thunder you know it’s time to head in and that is what we did. An hour and one-half run in and 18 tuna in the box and it was a day for memories.
….and this is what it’s all about!
Tuna loin marinated in oriental salad dressing and quick seared on the barbecue with home grown rasberries.
Menu
Categories
