San Diego in October still thinks it is summer, and so do the bluefin. The water sits in the high sixties off the Nine Mile Bank and the Coronados, and the tuna that showed up in June are still out there, bigger now and no easier. The way you fish them is on an overnight boat out of the sportfishing landings, a seventy or eighty foot party boat with bunks below, a galley that serves burritos at two in the morning, and forty people on the rail who all paid for the same thing and will not all get it. You leave at nine at night, you sleep badly, and at first light you are standing on a deck in the middle of the ocean waiting for someone to yell.
The yell came at ten past six. Foamers, the captain said over the speaker, and off the starboard bow a quarter acre of ocean turned white where a school of bluefin was blowing through a bait ball. Everybody who had a live sardine pinned on threw it. Nothing ate. October bluefin are fat and picky, and a sardine on a hook does not interest a fish that has been eating free sardines for four months. So the deckhands put up the kite.
Kite fishing for bluefin is the strangest thing I have done with a rod. A kite goes up off the stern on its own reel, and from the kite line hangs a rubber flying fish with hooks in it, rigged so it skips across the surface forty yards off the boat like it is trying to get away from something. One angler at a time fishes it, by lottery, and the fish, when it comes, comes straight up out of the water and eats a toy in midair. My number came up at eleven. I stood at the stern holding a rod with an eighty pound outfit for an hour and a half and watched a rubber fish skip across the Pacific, and I have had worse mornings.
At twelve forty the water under the flying fish bulged, and a bluefin as long as my leg came out of the ocean sideways and landed on it. The rod loaded, the reel screamed, and the deckhand next to me said one word, which was mine. The fish went down two hundred feet and stayed there for forty minutes while I walked it around the stern, past rods and under lines and over a cooler, with the deckhand steering me by the belt. When it came up it was a hundred and twelve pounds on the dock scale, blue and silver and perfect, and the entire boat cheered for the fish, not me, which was fair.
The captain said on the ride in that a kite fish is the only tuna where the whole boat sees the bite. I said that seemed like a lot of pressure. He said that was why they used a lottery.
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