The boat rocks to the left. “Are you going to get off your ass”—Bear nails me in the ribs with his foot—“or stare at the sky all morning?”
The foamy crests of crashing waves lap at the boat, the sputtering engine, setting a steady rotation. Sitting up, I catch Bear’s foot and yank it toward me. He falls to the deck with a whack and a curse falling from his lips, followed by “You motherfucker” as he rubs the side of his head.
Nivio, one of our two deckhands today, chuckles, lighting another cigarette, his knee bouncing with anticipation. I like Nivio. He’s steady and fearless, but he has a tendency to annoy me. Like now. The impulse to toss the kid overboard sends a thrill through me.
And Din Hansen, our other angler on board, I can’t stand that egotistical prick. He’s Bear’s friend. Not mine. Forty-something, seen it all, heard it all, and everything he does is a competition. While I don’t usually mind that, he’s always got a story that’s even more exaggerated than the last and leaves you wondering if any one of the nonsense that spews from his mouth is true.
I sit up, listening to the radio chatter. “Anything?” Nivio asks, his eyes on the water as he chews on a dried slice of ginger. He’s never been able to handle the wide-open ocean, even on a calm day.
“Not yet.” I peek over the edge. We’re about seventy miles off the coast of Westport. Albacore tuna like clean water and roughly around high fifties to low sixty-degree water, which means to get them, you gotta go out where the water’s clean.
Leaning over, I peer down at the water. I’m looking for that clean green color to turn blue. Sometimes green water has more fish because of the plankton count, but sometimes not. I scan the horizon with binoculars. There are fish on the sonar, but they’re scattered thirty to fifty feet deep. Tuna that deep rarely come up for the trolling gear we use, so if you want to catch fish, you gotta bait them up. When most people think of tuna, they think bluefin or even albacore, but rarely do you think of them being in Washington.
Every year, the Pacific Northwest gets the migration of albacore tuna that come across the Pacific north of the San Francisco Bay area. They travel up the coast to Alaska and cycle back around to Japan. From the months of mid-June to the end of October, they’re out there if you’re willing to hunt them. At a profit of nearly two bucks a pound, it’s worth it if you know how to catch them.
Me and my brother, we know how to work the iron, as my dad would say.
The Hardy men, we have salt-water in our veins. Finding peace where civilization ends, I’ve been trolling the ocean for as long as I can remember. I come from a family of fishermen. You should have seen my dad. You should have seen my granddad, and all the men that came before them. Before GPS, depth finders and plotters. Those guys, they’re legends.
Tuna fishing, addictive. Nothing beats the singing of a line screaming off reels with multiple albacores hitting doubles, triples, and quads. It’s like a hit of cocaine. Once you get a taste of living on the edge, there’s no going back.
Though he rarely fished tuna, Rhett had been the same way. Rhett. Wow. I haven’t said his name in a while. Feels strange to think years before, there were three Hardy boys tearing up the west coast. I blink away my thoughts, focusing on the sonar. “Drop some iron.”
At my demand, Nivio pitches a swimbait and sets it in the rod holder to drift. Beside him, Bear tosses chum and a rod with live bait. I don’t need to say much of anything to them. These guys know how to hunt tuna just like me, and though I don’t care for Din, he’s one of the best anglers I know.
With the combination of the iron, swimbaits, and chum, it brings the tuna up under the boat. In three hours, we have a tank full of tuna on ice. At least it will cover the $1800 in fuel and $500 for the ice.
I look down at Bear’s shorts. They’re tinted pink. “Why’d you wear white shorts?”
Bear glances down at his shorts and laughs. “No idea.”