Bluefin Summer

The warm, overcast morning of September 11, 2004, has become a reference point in my life. Alone at daybreak, two miles out of Chatham, Massachusetts, in my 21-foot Contender, the Assignment, I'd seen a cloud of birds over busting fish. I assumed they were bluefish, but just to make sure they weren't stripers, I grabbed the spinning rod and fired out a hookless torpedo plug. As it landed a gleaming bluefin tuna of perhaps 80 pounds pounced on it like a mousing coyote.

Attacking the ancient, overfilled Fin-Nor reel verbally and with a screwdriver, I excavated the leader, set up my 12-weight Sage, and tied on a Jellyfish--the white, wing-flapping concoction of legendary Montauk guide and raconteur David Blinken. For the next three hours I chased tight pods of tuna. They didn't race around like albies but, save for rare breaches, rolled lazily or cruised just below the surface like sluiced pulp logs. The sweet, fruity scent of sand eels whole and chopped hung on the soft south wind. Finally three beasts about the size of the first one I'd seen appeared under my fly just as it hit the water. The middle one sucked it in.

I could beat the fish on this gear, given generous measures of luck and knowledge--neither of which I possessed on that day. The first mistake I made was to follow--steering, reeling, hauling down the radio antenna and extra fly rods, reaching over the high side to flip the line off a lobster buoy. When they swim tuna oxygenate, and if you follow before you have to, they'll go on forever. My second mistake was trying to herd the fish away from a cluster of lobster pots. It worked the first time, not the second. Now, an hour after hookup and nine miles seaward, the fish doubled back, creating so much slack I couldn't keep the backing out of the prop when I plunged the rod into the water. They could hear my screams in Chatham.

Cut to August 2005. I receive a phone call from Richard Reagan--creator of the famed Albie Whore (similar to the Jellyfish, but with wings plastered to the sides with hot glue) and, in his lesser role, president and fellow board member of the Norcross Wildlife Foundation. Richard Reagan--the man who until this very minute had defined flyrodding for bluefins as "a boat ride," but who guided by Blinken, had just landed seven off Rhode Island. "No one lands seven tuna in one day," I informed him. But he insisted it was true; and from across the room, barely audible over the clinking ice in their single malts, Blinken backed him up. For most of the day they'd been surrounded by vast schools that churned the water white. I ordered Reagan and his able assistant, Capt. John McMurray (a saltwater flyrod guide on weekends), to appear at my house the next evening. Reagan offered the lame excuse of work.

But at 5:30 am on August 9 McMurray and I splashed the Assignment at Galilee, Rhode Island. The fog that had worried us all the way down lifted a hundred yards from the ramp. Two miles out McMurray yelled, "Tuna!" I wasn't convinced. Then tuna erupted all around us, sending up showers of one-inch peanut bunker. Nothing lazy about these fish. They didn't roll or cruise; they slashed and leapt, frequently clearing the water. We could see their geysers a mile away. I eased the Assignment to the edge of the nearest school, and McMurray laid down one of the Albie Whores Reagan had tied for us.

"There he is," he shouted after his third strip. Backing poured out of his reel, but I resisted the temptation to follow; and when I had to follow, the fish shot toward us. Three other boats arrived. Blinken hailed us on the radio. New schools popped up at all compass points, and the brightening sun turned the peanut bunker into welding sparks. McMurray, using a reel with no anti-reverse, switched hands, holding his 9-weight briefly with his bloody left and shaking his right.

These were two-year-old tuna--20 to 35 pounds--and most likely progeny of the big 1994 year class. Every flyrodder wants to tangle with an older fish, as I had the previous year, but they'll tie up the boat for three hours and the chances they'll survive aren't great. Even to target bluefins a boat owner/ operator needs a "highly migratory" permit available for $22 from the highly unfriendly Web site of the National Marine Fisheries Service (www.nmfspermits.com) or by phoning 888-872-8862. Guests fish free. Size and bag limits (which apply to boat, not individual anglers) change according to harvest, so keep checking the Web site. During most of the summer of 2005 a boat was allowed to kill one fish per day between 27 and 72 inches fork length. You must report every tuna landed at the same number (press 1 to avoid an endless stream of BS). Even if you don't have a tuna in your boat when you're checked, you're going to have to do some fancy talking if you don't have a permit and someone has been casting a tarpon rod with a big, anti-reverse reel.

Fifty minutes after McMurray struck his fish I hoisted it by the leader and hard tail and laid it on the gunwale tape. It measured 33 inches from lip to fork. Calico flanks were hard and cold, seemingly scaleless and with barely any slime. Horizontal stabilizers jutted from the caudle peduncle. Fins folded into groves that facilitated speed bursts of at least 55 mph. Double-hinge jaws swung the mouth out as well as open. Gills were immense. Instead of pumping water through their gills like lesser fish, tuna reverse the process, pushing their gills through the water, mouths agape, supercharging their warm, blood-rich muscles like ramjets. Tunas lack air bladders, so they must swim every minute of their lives; restrained, they suffocate and drown. When you run your hand over their brows you can sometimes feel the light-sensing window used for navigation. Paired arteries and veins with opposite directions of flow act as heat exchangers and barriers to heat loss.

When I bled this fish its enormous heart shot thick pulses of blood into a five-gallon bucket, and when I gutted it I could feel the body heat. You don't kill one of these highly advanced wanderers of our planet casually, but you don't need to don ashes and sackcloth if you do. These are the babies; and, even before predation by humans, very few make it to spawning age.

McMurray's fish taught us two lessons: 1) Anything under a 12-weight is going to hurt you and the fish; and 2) do your best not to let any object, even the tape measure, touch a tuna; the scaleless appearance is an illusion. Scales come off easily, leaving a gel of gray dust on anything they contact.