Albacore do not visit Oregon. They ride a warm current north somewhere past the horizon, and once or twice a summer that current wanders close enough to shore that a sport boat can reach it and get home the same day. Everything about the trip depends on where a finger of sixty-two degree blue water sat when the last satellite pass went over. That was yesterday. The water moves at night. Nobody tells you this part at the boat show.
You leave Garibaldi at four in the morning because the bar is a bar and it does not care about your schedule. Crossing in the dark is a quiet business. Everyone stands, nobody talks, the skipper watches a set roll under the bow and then puts the throttles down in a gap only he can see. After that comes two and a half hours of open ocean at twenty knots, during which the water goes from the color of a parking lot to green to a blue so dark it looks like a hole. When the temperature gauge clicks over a full degree in about a boat length, somebody says there it is, and the trolling starts.
Albacore fishing has two speeds and no middle. For an hour you drag cedar plugs and clones at six and a half knots and stare at a wake, and it is the most boring thing you have ever paid for. Then four rods go off inside two seconds and the whole afternoon changes character. The skipper knocks it out of gear, somebody starts throwing live anchovies over the transom by the handful, and the water behind the boat fills with fish that boil and slash and refuse to leave as long as the bait keeps coming. Nobody reels calmly. Albacore run in circles under the boat and dig like they are getting paid by the foot, and a twenty pounder on a light rod will make an accountant say things his mother would recognize.
We fished with a Tillamook man who runs a twenty-eight foot boat older than most of the crew and reads sea surface temperature charts the way other people read a hymnal. He had circled a spot in grease pencil on Sunday and it was not there on Tuesday, so he ran eleven more miles west without saying a word about it and found the break anyway. His only comment all morning was that the birds looked lazy.
We came home with fourteen fish in the slush and a cockpit that needed a hose and a conscience. The run in took three hours, everybody slept sitting up, and the cleaning table did not clear until dark. Somewhere out there the blue water kept moving north without us, which is how the arrangement has always worked.
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