Bluefin Summer

It was the best 15 hours of fishing I've ever had. I try not to count fish, but you can't help it with tuna--14 hooked, 12 landed. I learned a lot about bluefins that day: that their little teeth can make your thumb and forefinger look like you used them to stop the wire brush on an electric grinder, that unhooking them is infinitely harder with no one to hold them for you, that when they get under your boat (as they always do after 15 or 20 minutes) you need to raise your motor (and then remember to lower it before you start it again), that it is absolutely impossible to land a bluefin alone unless you slack off, throw down your rod, and grab the leader. And, finally, I learned what it must feel like to play 60 minutes of tackle football with no pads.

McMurray, a patron of the fly-fishing forum www.reeltime.com, wrote up our adventure, eliciting an immediate e-mail to me from the Socrates of Yankee striper guides, Capt. Doug Jowett. "Get down here fast," I ordered. "You and I may never live to see this again." We had a good day on Rhode Island Sound durring which Jowett blew up a 14-weight rod 200 yards from shore but landed the fish handily with the butt section. And we had an epic day on Cape Cod Bay in lightning and driving rain, amid whales, lunging sheerwaters and huge, frothing schools of tuna which, more often than not, stayed with us all the time we were hooked up, then vanished like summer love. We learned that 20-pound tippets aren't enough because bluefins can bust them with zero rod pressure merely by dragging line and backing at warp speed.

After Jowett sacrificed his shoulder to a 50-pounder, which he beat despite the pain and which proved the best fish of the summer, I took the Assignment's bow for the rest of the day, mumbling a brief and feeble protest. When fish spurned my Jellyfish, Jowett passed me one of his Bunny Flies, and I was tight on the first cast. But it was the next school that taught us the lesson because it spurned the Bunny Fly and jumped all over the Jellyfish.

The tuna stayed around till November, but we encountered only lazy rollers. Jowett's clients had a few to the boat, but no one aboard the Assignment hooked up again.

There are all kinds of plausible theories for the tuna invasion of 2005, none of which is good management. A law--written by and for the commercial fishermen of the East Coast Tuna Association--mandates that US tuna regs can't be more restrictive than international ones. And the fishmongers and politicians who run the international management body (the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas) have looked after the species like 19th Century bison hunters. In 2005, when the East Coast Tuna Association failed to kill its quota of giants in Cape Cod Bay (despite its "gentleman's agreement" not to go there), it sought and received permission from the National Marine Fisheries Service to plunder the fish off North Carolina. There have been no good year classes since 1994, and none coming along from before. The 2001 bluefin biomass (the last measured) was 13 percent of what it was in 1975.

I wish I could be more sanguine, but my theory is that lots of bait blew into Rhode Island Sound. As for Cape Cod Bay, you can find a few bluefins there most every summer, and perhaps Jowett and I, for once, hit it right. Finally, what I believe most fervently--not a theory but a postulate--is the mantra we chanted all summer: "We may never live to see this again." That, of course, could apply equally to the sunrise. So if the tuna show up in 2006, get your priorities straight and chase them.