Tuna Slayer

There are times, it seems, when new places and things help us to appreciate the old ones. I was reminded of this one Saturday in mid-August. No, I wasn’t in a church or a library, nor was I conversing with someone older and wiser than myself. I was steadying myself against a pitching and rolling tunaboat. Yes, tunaboat.

I struggled to keep my balance, admire my first tuna, and wipe its blood off my T-shirt, all while trying to keep from barfing up the last 12 hours’ worth of food. My brother staggered (not from the pitching and rolling of the boat, but rather from a type of internal "imbalance") over to me, and slapped my back hard enough to floor me.

"Nothing like flyfishing, huh?"

"Oh yeah." I didn’t lie.

It all started when we arrived in Ocean City, Maryland, sometime around midnight. I thought this timing strange, until I saw all the other tunaslayers wandering around, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the boats. A couple of ooh’s and aah’s and sandwiches later, I grabbed one last hour’s sleep before sunrise.

Later that morning I thought we would have trouble when I saw how many intended boatloads of people cheerfully accepted their money back, rather than head out into the heavy seas forecasted...I knew we were in trouble when my brother had to give our captain a wake-up call.

After a brief dockside huddle, of course we decided to head out for tuna. After all, we reasoned, we’re men (in a manner of speaking), not mice, and some guys questioned whether their wives would let them out again with $200 and two truckloads of lunch supplies.

Having slept through the two-hour boat ride to the fishing grounds, I seemed to have missed the traditional name-pulling ceremony, whereby I was anointed to take the chair for the first fish. As a member of the sober half of our congregation, I doubted the sanctity of this transaction, but who am I to question tradition? My brother lurched down to my bunk and woke me up with enthusiastic congratulations.

"We’re here! We pulled names and you won first watch!"

"When do we slow down to fish?" I could see that we were still moving fast enough to pull a water-skier.

"Oh man, we’re trolling!" He laughed, grabbing both upper bunks to keep from falling.

I crawled across the cabin and out into the sunlight... O.K., into the leaden skies of a potentially nasty, late-summer day. As I took the chair, though, I got pretty wound up as I watched the mate making final preparations. I felt like Ernest Hemingway, nerves taut for intense, immediate action.

I sat four three hours. Behind the boat, I watched a bright-green mobile (worthy of any playpen), outfitted with outrageous plastic squid, bounce across the waves. All around me, a bewildering trapeze of downrigger and fishing line waited as ready for action as I, and to the front of the boat, my fishing partners consumed unholy quantities of lunch supplies. Oh, and they toasted every fish ever caught by every man, woman, and child who ever fished. Tired, thirsty, nauseous, and, yes, a little bored, I could now relate to the infantrymen in every war movie I had ever seen, and I was just beginning to understand the thousand-yard stare...

When the fish hit, appropriately enough at high noon, the action was fast. Until I actually had to reel him in. You just have no idea what dredging up thirty-five pounds of fish in 150 feet of heaving ocean feels like, until you do it for the first time. I was as grateful to see the mate plop it in the livewell as I was to exit the chair. Incidentally, chumming after the catch doesn’t seem to increase catch rates.

My fellow tunaslayers celebrated the first catch, and amid the revelry, high-fives, and peeing into the ocean, my brother launched me into profound revelation. (Remember: "Nothing like flyfishing, huh?")

Nothing, indeed. In my mind’s eye, I pictured a succession of beautiful fish: my first rainbow, a 19 or 20-inch (believe it or not) hatchery inmate, taken on a black Woolly Bugger from the Sand Wash pond. Next, a mammoth lake trout, my first Alaska fish and larger than the rainbow, he came out to play for countless minutes during the last hour of the long June daylight. The scenery alone, surrounding the quiet cold of Trail Lake, just outside of Moose Pass, (yes, really) was well worth the price of admission. That fish surrendered to the flash of a purple Woolly Bugger, weighted and tied with a bit of crystal flash in the undulating marabou tail. Two flies, easy enough for me to tie and productive enough for me to fish with confidence, relegating more than fifty dollars’ worth of specialty Alaska flies to a neglected corner of my fly box.

The film still rolling, I saw my young daughter’s first fish, caught on a kernel of corn impaled on a small hook, hastily stripped of feathers. She screamed with delight and terror as the small bluegill struggled from her death grip back into Lake Hudson. She made that same sound when I gave her a lesson on streamside ethics, explaining to her not to waste Nature’s gifts, as I cleaned a small trout I was determined to catch, clean, and cook for myself. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen me clean a fish, it’s not a poetic thing of beauty.

The lesson here in all this was very basic and very simple: Do what you love, and pass that on to those whom you love. Take from nature only what you need, and pass that on to those whom you love. And run like hell when the weather reports call for high winds and heavy seas!

-- M.M. Clarke--
Winter 2001 Issue