Every October a strange fever settles over Harkers Island, North Carolina. The motels fill with people who have driven from Pennsylvania and Vermont with fly rods and no interest in dinner. The fish they come for is the false albacore, a small tuna cousin nobody eats, that shows up off Cape Lookout for a few weeks to chase bait around the shoals. It is called a false albacore because it is not one, and a little tunny because it is, and the people who chase it call it an albie and do not sleep well.
I fished with a Harkers Island guide I will call Captain Ronnie, who runs a center console with a casting deck and a temper that only surfaces when a fish is missed. We cleared the inlet at daylight with the lighthouse standing off to the east in its black and white diamonds. Albies do not hold anywhere. You look for birds. When the terns start diving and the water underneath them boils white, you run at it, cut the motor upwind and throw a fly the size of a cigarette butt into the mess before it sinks out of sight. The whole thing lasts about forty seconds and then the fish are gone and you look for more birds.
My first cast at a real blitz landed somewhere close to the right ocean. The fish were coming through in a line like commuters and one of them ate the fly going the opposite direction. I have heard people describe the run and did not believe them. The reel made a sound I had never heard a reel make, line went off it in a straight line toward Portugal, and the backing knot went through the guides before I remembered I had backing. Ronnie said to let it go. There was no other plan available.
An albie runs, turns, runs again, and then does a thing where it swims in circles under the boat as if it is looking for the exit. Ten minutes on an eight weight and it came up green and silver with that wavy pattern on its back, hard as a football and vibrating in my hands. We took the picture quick and dropped it in head first, and it was gone like it had never stopped. Ronnie said that was a nice one and that the next one would be bigger, which is what guides say, and which was true.
We ran birds all morning and I hooked seven and landed four, which Ronnie said was about the average for someone who casts like a man swatting bees. On the way in a boat from Connecticut flagged us down to ask where the fish were. Ronnie pointed at the whole Atlantic and said, out there, and meant it kindly.
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