The albies show up off Montauk sometime in the back half of August, and nobody can tell you which day. They arrive the way weather arrives. One morning the rips off the point are the same gray water they have been all summer, and the next morning there is a patch out there going white for no reason anyone can see, with terns falling into it like somebody kicked over a bucket. That is the whole announcement. There is no run-up and no warning, and the boats that were out there fishing for something else quietly stop fishing for something else.
A false albacore is not much of a tuna by weight. Eight pounds is a good one, twelve is a story. What they have instead is gearing. The first run off a hooked albie goes a hundred and fifty yards before you have finished being surprised, and it goes there in a straight line at a speed that makes the drag on a striper reel sound like it is being asked a personal question. Nobody keeps them. They are dark and oily and taste roughly like the inside of a bait cooler. So the entire fishery consists of grown adults burning fuel and daylight to briefly upset a fish they intend to hand right back.
The hard part is not finding them, it is arriving correctly. A blitz on the surface lasts about as long as it takes to read this sentence twice. Run the boat into the middle of it and the whole thing folds up and reappears three hundred yards away, and after you do that twice, the boat that stayed outside and waited will be hooked up and you will not be. The old man who taught us the etiquette of it put the engine in neutral a full cast short of the froth and said the only thing worth saying out there: get ahead of them, shut up, and let them come to you.
They are also, for a fish with a brain the size of a marble, remarkably picky. Albies eat bay anchovies about an inch and a half long, and they eat them by looking at them first. Anything with a wobble, a rattle, or an honest day of work in it gets refused. What works is a small metal jig cast well past the edge of the school and then reeled faster than feels reasonable, so that it never once behaves like something making a decision. My first six casts landed perfectly and did nothing at all. The seventh landed badly, off the back of the school, and I reeled it in fast out of frustration to try again. That one got eaten immediately, which is the kind of lesson the ocean enjoys teaching.
By ten the fish had gone down and the lighthouse had a normal amount of gulls on it and it was an ordinary Tuesday again. Four fish, all released, none of them heavy enough to bother a scale, and every hand on board was cramped. Somebody asked whether it counted as tuna fishing. It does, technically, at about a twentieth of the price and none of the dinner.