Change of Tack, Tactics for Albacore

Dave Baum considered himself fortunate merely to be able to be aboard the Producer when it pulled out of its dock at H&M; Landing in San Diego last Saturday night.

“I fish whenever I can get the wife to let me,” the 34-year-old Lakewood resident says. “Sometimes have to bribe her. What I do is give her money for home improvement and things like that.”

The arrangement paid off for Baum on last week’s excursion. He gained notoriety Sunday for catching the first albacore of the season, thereby throwing the saltwater fishing community into a state of full alert and causing a major change in the thinking of anglers and skippers alike.

“We have to decide whether to stay inside and fish for yellowtail or concentrate outside where the [albacore] are being caught,” says Ray Sobieck, skipper of the Producer.

That decision will become a no-brainer if the bite continues to improve. Already, daily counts are at 100 or more, rekindling memories of the days when the voracious tuna would grace the Baja coastline by the thousands.

“When we were catching albacore, people lined up by the hundreds to get on a boat,” recalls Paul Morris, manager of Fisherman’s Landing. “It was a carnival atmosphere--we were putting 50-100 people on every boat. There were no complaints about the passenger loads in those days, I’ll tell you that.”

There hasn’t been an albacore season to speak of since 1989, when the San Diego fleet scored 19,000. “And 19,000 fish was not a good year,” Morris says.

The last good year, with six-figure counts, was 1985.

In the years leading to 1985, the bite was so predictable that skippers built careers around the albacore run.

“Albacore fever was an addiction,” says Michael Fowlkes, a former boat owner who now produces “Inside Sportfishing” for Fox Sports West. “You’d go to the docks and you could not find a place to park, and there was not a single space available on any boat [without a reservation]. Anything that could run and float went out, and anyone with a license to drive one went out.

“That’s what made me want to become a fisherman. That’s what hooked me on fishing. My whole life’s dream was to buy a boat and become an albacore fisherman.”

His dream came true when he bought the 48-foot, six-passenger vessel Instinct in 1984. But when the albacore runs fizzled out after ‘85, so did interest in the more expensive “six-pack,” or six-passenger charter boats.

Fowlkes, who had quit his high-stress job in the television industry to get into the sportfishing business, eventually sold his boat and got back into show business.

Philip Friedman of Torrance, hoping to cash in on the fanatical interest in albacore, began the fishing information hotline, 976-TUNA, in the fall of 1985, just after the last substantial albacore run.

“We started right at the end of the craze and everybody still blames the lack of albacore on us,” he says, half-jokingly.

He has managed to maintain a fairly profitable business despite the absence of albacore, but he says that whenever even some of the longfins surface, his phones remind him of what might have been.

“We’re adding more phone lines to take the surge of incoming calls because callers are getting busy signals,” he said two days after Baum’s 16-pounder hit the deck.

Experts theorize that a cyclical change in oceanic conditions, perhaps associated with a series of El Ninos in recent years, has resulted in warmer water and a subsequent change in the migration patterns of albacore.

“That and the fact that in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, they [commercial fishermen] were gill-netting the hell out of the North Pacific,” says Tim Barnett, a marine physicist with Scripps Institute of Oceanography. “They were laying 20,000 miles of net a night. They netted the whole damned North Pacific. Now that that’s been banned [an international ban on high-seas drift nets was imposed nearly five years ago] we think the stocks are responding.”

Albacore, which prefer water in the low- to mid-60s, are believed to migrate from the south and west Pacific into the eastern Pacific each spring and summer. Most veer left and end up off the Pacific Northwest.

Some--perhaps a separate stock of fish--would make their way into the nutrient-rich waters off Baja California. For most of the past decade, with sea temperatures often closer to and even above 70 degrees, the ocean south of Point Loma supported plenty of yellowfin and bluefin tuna, but relatively few, if any, albacore.

Though the effects of another predicted El Nino are expected to warm things up again this summer, there are currently vast bands of cooler water stretching from mid-Baja north.

Barnett says he wouldn’t be “overly surprised” to see an albacore season develop, but he added that any season probably would be an abbreviated one.

“I’d advise people, if a bite does develop, to get on it early because it might not be around long,” he adds.

If a season does materialize, look for people to forget all about the yellowtail, the yellowfin and even the bluefin. For some inexplicable reason, only an albacore can turn ordinary anglers into fanatical fishermen.

“I think it’s the quiet and then the pandemonium,” says Bob Fletcher, president of the San Diego-based Sportfishing Assn. of California. “When you catch yellowtail, you kind of build up to the bite. You catch one, then two and then may five at a time . . .

“But with albacore you have the monotonous drone of the engines and nothing is happening and you’re just sitting there and then one fish hits the jig and you throw some bait and all these fish come up boiling and you have people yelling and running in different directions.

“It is that rush of adrenaline . . . [Bluefin and yellowfin] do that too, but with albacore you have the added benefit or bonus of that delicious white meat that comes off the barbecue.

“And it’s something we haven’t had for a while, so now more than ever you’ll have that rush to the docks.

“If this bite picks up you’ll really see a change down there.”

SORRY, CHARLIE

Bat Batsford, president of the San Francisco Bay Area Tuna Club, which claims a 95.62% success rate in 24 years of predicting the beginnings of albacore seasons in California, says the first sport-caught albacore in state waters within 100 miles of the coast will be caught June 24 at the San Juan Sea Mount off Point Conception, weather permitting.

He may want to move that date up. Last Saturday, the day before Baum ignited albacore fever in the Southland, Gary Black, a San Diego-based commercial jig fisherman en route to the Midway fishery, landed 10 albacore at the San Juan, which may spark an earlier interest among the Central California sportfishers.

Last season the first commercial catch, also at the San Juan, didn’t come until July 7.

CATCH OF THE WEEK

John Casper, a cook on the Conquest out of San Diego, caught a 133-pound opah after a 25-minute struggle while fishing for tuna 42 miles southwest of Point Loma. Casper’s giant, silvery moonfish would have eclipsed the all-tackle world record by more than 10 pounds had he not let a fellow crew member handle the rod during the fight.

SMOKE ON THE WATER

Memorial Day weekend is upon us, and with it comes the annual warning from boating organizations that big crowds, generous consumption of alcohol and general stupidity will spell disaster on one of the busiest weekends of the year.

The Boat Owners Assn. of the United States estimates that as many as 50 people will die and many more will be injured in boating accidents over the three-day period.

To increase your chances of not becoming one of these statistics, BOAT/U.S. suggests, above all other precautions, wearing a life jacket and watching your drinking. Nine of 10 people who drown in boating accidents aren’t wearing a life jacket, and more than 50% of fatal accidents involve alcohol abuse.

TUOLOMNE BOOST

River rafters for the first time in more than 20 years will be able to tour the Tuolomne, one of California’s premier wilderness whitewater destinations, on the seventh day.

Because demands for electricity in the rural region west of Yosemite are at a minimum on weekends, flows on the Tuolomne from Cherry Lake, its source, have been reduced a little on Saturdays and to barely a trickle--”just enough to keep the fish alive,” one outfitter says--on Sundays.

What this has meant for rafters on weekend two-day trips is a mild Saturday run, a Sunday layover camp-out, and a wilder Monday run to end the trip.

That will change for this year only because Cherry Lake is being lowered for repairs at Holm Powerhouse, meaning wilder Saturdays on the popular river and a two-day trip that will actually enable rafters to take a weekend trip and make it back to work on Monday.

“They’ve informed us that we will have water seven days through October 5,” outfitter Bob Ferguson says. “The nice thing, too, is that September, usually one of our slower months, will be one of the nicer months because we’ll still have all that water.”

For a list of outfitters on the Tuolomne, call (800) 552-3625.

AROUND THE SOUTHLAND

The Cabrillo Marine Aquarium is holding a “Meet the Grunion” program Saturday at 8 p.m. There will be a film on grunion followed by a trip to the beach to await their invasion. Cost is $1. Details: (310) 548-7562, Ext. 5011.