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What would you like to hear about the tuna total--before, during, or after the fish were hitting? It was, once again, not a very pretty sight. Yes, we went far offshore, and somehow, through the luck of the draw, we were underway in the thick of a squall that was spitting rain from the dark sky and sending huge rollers over the bow, cracking glass. Have we not been here before? We actually pay very royally for these "near death" experiences?
This time was different. How different you say? Only this--this time, the Captain got sick, too!
No, such an outing is not for everybody--it would be just too much fun if that were the case! But this is the time for me to tell about tuna. These solid-fueled rocket propelled big-headed aerobic distance athletes are very aerobic in their exercise patterns. What that means is that when they are hooked and fight their way along with a flat stiff side to the waters' resistance, they are stiff-arming you with a pectoral fin extended like a running back with fenders. If you can keep the tension on them so that their head is up, it is like pinching their nose shut. They run out of the air they extract from the water racing through their gills. If you let up on the rod's tension for even a moment, that surge of fresh oxygenated water through their gills gives them the supercharge to fire their afterburners, and that means that they are going to take that 150 yards of hard-pumped monofilament you worked so hard to gain on them, and cause it to smoke as it heats up the reel to be hot to the touch.
This phrase in calling this sport "fighting game fish" is not a figure of speech. It is a literal prize fight in which the aquatic opponent has lived in the element on whose terms you are seeking him, and he is better adapted to the medium. "Wearing out" a tuna is not an easy or intuitively obvious match. Even if I should outweigh the yellowfin by a factor of four to five (and there are bluefin tuna that outweigh the anglers who pursue them by twice those factors!) he has more adaptive tricks in his quiver than I might if the struggle were evenly matched. The tuna is a pelagic speedster who wanders vast distances as well as depths of an ocean we only know at its fringes and surface.
You see us here after a rough day in which we were beaten up badly by the ocean, but we toughed that out, even if barely. In the contest with the tuna, we were beaten, badly. We fought until our muscles were anaerobic, and that's when theirs were infused with new life, from the surge of oxygenated blood they gasped with their gills. The fish were still hitting, and two of them were running simultaneously when the human counterpart pugilists just gave up. We couldn't take it, and there was no way we could relieve each other. What looks like an uneven score in this photo is, in fact, even more uneven than it looks. There were three anglers, the captain and the mate, and at the end of the day there were eight tuna on board. Lest there be any doubt as to the winners and losers of this encounter, we were beat bad. We gave up in the middle of the struggle, and the tuna not on board were still ripping off line. I know when I am beaten by a better opponent. The fins have it!