The Brains in the Family

By: Heather Maxwell

(unedited version, originally published in Fish Boats Registry April, 2006)

Just down the coast from the Virginia state line lies an inlet unlike any other. Formed in the great nor’easter of 1846, Oregon Inlet has proven itself to be a year round fishing destination. Well know as a profitable location for commercial fishing, the sportys have moved in over the years and the economic impact of recreational fishing has turned heads in the tourist towns of North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Given Oregon Inlet’s reputation and the mystique of the Graveyard of the Atlantic, I sometimes wonder why all the private boaters and charter clients come this way. The answer is simple but you’ll find that the pursuit is a bit more complicated. The “hook” for the sportys and the commercial men before them is the tuna fish.

Smarter Than Your Average Pelagic
My dad says my sister got the brains in the family. No matter to me as I am the “baby”, but I wonder at times how that made my brother feel. Dolphin, known as mahi-mahi in some parts, don’t seem to care much that tuna are smarter. Driven by their stomachs, the only evolution I have witnessed in dolphin fishing was a product of the Oregon Inlet fleet – keep the boat in gear while bailing small dolphin and the school will stay with you. See, stupid. Billfish, on the other hand, seem to be a bit more intelligent at times relying on the speed of their prey as an indication of its origin. A tough catch in their own right, wahoo may be smarter still or could simply be fewer and farther between. But the tuna is in a class by itself.

Tuna, which include yellowfin, bluefin, blackfin, big eye and the “allison”, have the reputation around these parts as one of the smartest animals any man could choose to pursue. Likened to a deer on a public reserve, on a Saturday mind you, near the end of the season; the tuna and how to out think him has become a craze on our docks. The telltale signs are everywhere – the faraway look, stray seawitch hairs on clothing, moving tackle on and off the boat under the cover of night. All indications, at anytime of year, that a man has met his match and is bound and determined to win the next round.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be referring to yellowfin tuna in general.

History Repeats Itself
Charter fishing out of Oregon Inlet began by mistake back in the 1950’s. Most of the captains were commercial fishermen in the summer months and many of them provided guide services to affluent waterfowl hunters in the off season. Fate and an inshore red drum fisherman met one summer day and the first dolphin was boated on rod and reel. The rest is history and a gracious plenty of fish have been boated since. In the 1960’s boats crept farther offshore (probably due to local innovative hull designs but that is another story) and fishing trips were advertised at $90 per day. About the time I graduated from Kindergarten, local captains began to realize the benefit of day-in day-out tuna fishing and the mighty quest began.

Any true stock assessments are hard to come by for a highly migratory species but generally speaking let’s just agree that yellowfin stock is not in peril. In a perfect world there are plenty of tuna, our bait is the finest available on the market and our hooks are sharp – so why can’t we catch tuna on the same bait, same hooks as last week? Because the yellowfin are smarter than they were last week. Let alone last year.

The mighty tuna fisherman has an arsenal of weapons so large that he dare not keep it on his boat. The munitions are heavy and could cost him efficiency and more importantly the boat is not secure. Not that a dockpartner would actually steal but I have known a few that would chance getting caught to measure a spreader bar. No. It’s best to keep it all in the garage, take a little to the boat one weekend at a time and purge the bits as they lose their effectiveness.

But how do you know what to take aboard and what to leave behind? This is where instinct, homework and experience collide with history as it repeats itself.

You Are What You Eat
One of the best tips I have ever heard about tuna fishing comes from my own husband, a charter skipper of 14 years. “We cut them open and…” says Billy Maxwell over dinner at least two times a week. Running the Tuna Fever out of the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, Maxwell makes yellowfin a regular topic of conversation in my house. His best advice, although revealing it here may land me in divorce court, is to stay on top of the dietary habits of your quarry.

It is easy to get sidetracked with water color, temperature, trolling speeds and even salinity and all of those things can fine tune your fishability, but when it comes to tuna if you are not dragging baits that look (or act) like their diet of the day you can forget about it. So when you are discouraged because there is only one fish in the box, cut him open. Is it pilchards, flying fish, sardines or squid (pink, red or brown) inside? Whatever it is your chances are better if you can emulate it with something in the tackle box.

About twelve years ago the big guns were spreader bars, a mass of plastic squid rigged from a single bar meant to imitate a school of bait, and pop-r plugs which were cast from a spinning rod to fish on the surface. The plugs faded away after El Nino with the hot surface temperatures and top water bites. They have yet to return but we have yet to experience another El Nino. Spreader Bars, on the other hand, are a regular find on any offshore boat. Every spring there are several of different configurations and colors. Until a couple seasons ago most spreader bars found their way back to the garage due to their ineffectiveness. As the elax squid moved into our fishing grounds over the past two seasons, spreader bars of brown, red or even orange turned out to be essential to a good catch. Why the red squid schools have replaced the pink squid of years ago, I do not know, but a spreader bar rigged in the proper color today will catch as many tuna as the pink bars of a decade ago.

The seawitch is another staple for tuna fisherman. Fine hair that comes in a myriad of colors is tied to a weighted head and rigged over a ballyhoo to give the illusion that it is what it is not. More specifically, that ballyhoo can be a pilchard, sardine or flying fish with a change of colored hair. Many deckhands I know go so far as the paint their heads with fingernail polish, but any tackle shop worth its salt should have purples, oranges and plain heads. Tying a seawitch is a simple art and the controversy between how much hair is too much hair would require more space than provided me – my best suggestion would be hire a deckhand off the dock and give him enough cash to get a good lesson.

The green stick is the best example of outwitting a tuna that I have come across. The stick is basically a vertical out rigger. A heavy line feeds out from the top with a large bird on the end to provide tension. From the line dangle several baits from rod and reel outfits in the cockpit – like a clip in the outrigger line. Rubber squid or flying fish, or probably a boot with a hook in it of the proper color, bounce up and down with the forward motion of the boat and wave action. The baits dipping in the water for seconds at a time emulate the behavior of prey evading the predator and absolutely drive tuna crazy. He is what he eats and other than swim and make baby tuna that’s all he does.

Splitting Hairs
The finer points of tuna fishing are where the obsession truly kicks into gear. Over the years I have witnessed the fall of many a fine fisherman into a fixation on tuna that takes him to every website reporting the daily fishing news when he is at work and behind each and every boat when he is on the docks. Water temperature, tide, wind, bottom structure, bait, salinity, even phytoplankton take their toll on the minds of fishermen.

Where to set out is obviously a big factor in your catch, although any captain who has never picked up and run to a bite hasn’t been fishing long enough. Resources for pinpointing sea surface temperatures include free websites, one of my favorites you can find by visiting www.rutgers.edu , right up to the mac daddy of fishing forecasters – Dr. Mitch Roffer. Visit www.roffs.com for more information on Roffers background, but suffice it to say that he knows all and shows all…for a fee. A temperature break of ten degrees may produce something or other, but a temperature break of ten degrees that has held for five days is bound to be, by now, the home of baitfish and where there is bait…well, you know the rest. Roffer prides himself on local knowledge, burning up the cell phones for on site information from local skippers, and offers pinpointed high probability locations for target species taking tide, wind and bottom structure into account. In other words, where the bite was yesterday is not necessarily where you’ll find it today. Knowing the movement of the water, more than any other reason is why skippers who fish every day start each day with an advantage.

Early in the season and during the dog days of summer, your best bet for finding fish apart from temperature breaks is bottom structure. In August when the surface has heated up, Oregon Inlet’s yellowfin go deep to the cool water and feed on bait which have congregated on structures below the surface. Knowing the bottom comes from years of experience and each of the local captains has their favorite rock, ledge or bump. Much of what constitutes a favorite depends on tide as one of the keys to fishing structure is the drop of the baits below the surface when the boat hits a mark on the plotter or fish finder and comes out of gear. Fishing a large bottom structure like Oregon Inlet’s Point, just 37 miles from the sea buoy, offers a multitude of opportunity even when mindlessly crisscrossing the space, but when the going gets tough the obsessed pick a spot out of the ocean that’s not much bigger than your living room.

Tried and True
Your line is the last avenue for gaining the upper hand, if only for a moment, on tuna. Introduced to Oregon Inlet’s fleet nigh on 10 years ago or so, fluorocarbon is the tuna fisherman’s true friend. Ever faithful, fluorocarbon will never let you down and will always be there for you, depending on how deep your pockets are. Back in the day, the cost of a spool of fluorocarbon would make my eye twitch, but given the obsessive compulsive tuna fisherman that I married, I don’t even bat an eye anymore that everything he’s got is spooled with gold.

Big eye are not the only tuna with big eyes. They have all got them and with big eyes come good vision. A tuna striking on the surface will roll on its side to get a better look at the bait before the strike. Fluorocarbon offers a stealthy advantage; it is, for all intensive purposes, invisible in the water. It does have its drawbacks and we have touched on cost. It will crush like glass if you crimp it too hard, so when you finish your rigs systematically give them a good yank to make sure the crimps don’t part. Lastly, if you rig up leaders with fluorocarbon and use a big ‘ole fat snap swivel to attach them to the main line you are defeating the purpose. Think direct rigs and your fortune will be well spent.

A Season of Pursuit
The season for yellowfin is best started in Hatteras, NC. The proximity to the Gulf Stream in April offers the best chances of a good catch. Slipping into May, incoming pods of fish move north outside of Oregon Inlet and if they don’t move on up the coast they stay in our waters, feeding and getting smarter. I’ve discussed some tricks of the trade, but highly recommend spending your fishing dollars with one of the local charter skippers if possible. Even when fishing your own boat from one of the local marinas for the season, a charter trip is a great place to pick up on local knowledge if you get a captain who will answer your questions. Charter trips and private boat dockage are available at each of the marinas listed.

From May to mid-July (historically) your catch is up to how much smarter you are than the tuna. July has always produced a fabulous big eye bite and the “eyes” usually give you some lead time…the old timers swear that they will bite one day, skip a day, and then bite again the next. I can’t hurt to try a blue and white Hawaiian eye in your spread if you’ll be targeting big eye. For yellowfin in August I highly recommend a charter trip, or for a switch try your hand at billfishing (the odds are better you’ll catch one of those). September find pods of tuna moving back down from the north and October cannot be beat for a target rich environment.

As winter comes on, so does some of our best tuna fishing. There is only one problem – the famed nor’easter. Early November is historically good for weather but after that it’s a true crap shoot. From hunting to gambling, our mothers would be proud. In any case, if you can get out, late winter usually produces a run of blackfin.

As the season progresses, so does the size of your average yellowfin. Pups grow to 60 pounders with a crescendo sometime early in July. The hot water bite is a mix of sizes. In fall they get fatter, wintertime produces a slimmer fish in the 30 pound range.

I’d be willing to bet the one that got the brains in your family is not reading this article. But then again a life without passion, whether for tuna or that perfect shot with a seven iron or even a 12-pointer, just lacks a little color.