Gone Fishin'!

QUITE UNFORTUNATELY these might continue to be text heavy posts for awhile because my camera is malfunctioning and I can't get my photos until I get it looked at, BUT here goes:

A few weeks ago my sweet dad came to Portland to take me fishing. My dad LOVES fishing, and I have literally been fishing with him since I was just barely walking (maybe even before). He REALLY loves deep sea fishing, and I had never been, so he made a plan to come up to the Pacific Northwest and take me! :) It was SO much fun, because I haven't had the opportunity to spend much time with my dad in quite awhile, and he is seriously the best.

I picked him up at the airport on a Tuesday night and we immediately headed Northwest, bound for Westport, Washington. We took a quick shopping trip to get some groceries about halfway through the trip and fought construction along the way, but finally made it to the cool old hotel we were staying at sometime around 11 PM. It was the first house ever built in Westport, over 100 years old, and the Kennedy's even stayed there once!! Unfortunately we didn't have much time to enjoy it because we had to be up around 4 AM!

After a SUPER short night's sleep (about 3 hours...eek!), we threw everything back in the car and headed for the docks. Our first stop was the Spindrift, our salmon fishing boat for the day. The deckhand was a super cool lady named Susie, and our captain was an old grandpa-type named Tommy. We got to see a dolphin and a sea lion in the water, but otherwise, salmon fishing was a complete bust. I had two bite and actually caught one, but the law says they have to be 24" or longer and mine didn't quite meet that so we had to throw it back. :( My dad didn't even get a bite. :( :( At the end of the day, we only had five fish on board for ten people fishing...catching our limit would have meant we had 20 fish on the boat, so it was a lousy fishing day. Still fun, and good to know that I didn't get seasick (PHEW!!), even though 4 of the 10 people were barfing over the side (ew!). The best thing that happened was that Susie kept telling us over and over how much we would LOVE our next trip later that day on the tuna boat.

So we went off for an amazing dinner at a nearby restaurant, then packed up our stuff and boarded the tuna boat. To fish for tuna, you have to go about 85 miles off-shore, so you head out on the boat the night before and sleep on the boat. SO COOL. We boarded the boat and waited for everyone so we could head out. Aside from the deckhand (who was super awesome and aside from the captain, the one person who knew what was going on), I was the only girl. :) The other deckhand, the captain, and the remaining nine were all men (and all married, DANG IT!!). I'm pretty sure they looked at me and thought, "Oh geez, what has this little girl gotten herself into?!"

Anticipating another early morning, we all headed to bed pretty darn early. The sleeping hold was down a ladder underneath the main cabin, and it was basically a bunch of shelves with some mattresses built in. Once I got used to the sound and motion of the sea, I slept pretty well, but 4 AM definitely came early.

We got up and ate some breakfast, and as soon as first light broke, we got some instructions and started fishing. They had 4 jig lines hooked up off the back of the boat, and we trolled in the morning, going pretty slowly to see if we could catch anything. It didn't take long to figure out we weren't just looking for a few fish, we were looking for giant schools of tuna.

First thing, we ran into a huge pod of white-sided porpoises. Yep, dolphins (okay, I know porpoises and dolphins aren't exactly the same thing, but close enough). They were AWESOME!! There were literally hundreds of them, and they were everywhere, jumping all around our boat, swimming alongside the boat and under the boat--SO cool. At least all of us fishermen thought so...the captain was NOT amused. Apparently the porpoises scare away the tuna, so the immediate plan was to GET AWAY FROM THE DANG DOLPHINS!! :)

Around 6:30 AM, we hit our first tuna school. We got a couple hooked up on the jig line, and once that happens, everyone starts moving. QUICKLY. We fished with live anchovies, so basically, as soon as a fish got hooked up on the jig line, everyone started yelling to let the captain know. He starts slowing down and turning to go back to where the fish was hooked up, and by the time the boat stops, everyone better have their dang bait in the water!

This is what an actual Albacore Tuna looks like--I was shocked that they look pretty much just like the cartoon! :)

I got the first fish of the morning on the boat, which I quickly learned is no easy task. Basically, here's how it goes:

You bait your hook (or someone baits it for you) and you toss it into the water. You put your reel on free spool, so it can spin freely with no resistance. Tuna are SUPER fast, so when they take (i.e., "hit") your bait, they are typically swimming 50-60 miles per hour. If you've ever been fishing before, you know that when you get a bite, your first inclination is to jerk your rod to set the hook. Not so with tuna. They hit your line and your reel starts spinning REALLY fast. You put your thumb gently on the reel to keep the line from getting totally tangled ("gently" is key, or you get a wicked burn on your thumb like my dad did) and count to ten. So after your first fish, you realize that ten seconds at 50-60 miles per hour is A FREAKING LOT OF LINE when you have to reel it all back in. After ten seconds, you flip it off free spool and then you just pull your line up gently and start reeling.

Most fish, like salmon, fight on the top of the water as you're reeling them in. You can see them jumping up on the top and you kind of know what you're up against. Again, not so with tuna. Tuna go out, yes, but they also go straight down! So you reel like mad to get them as close to the boat as you can, and pretty soon they're just deep below you, so you have to work them to the surface. Tuna fight really hard and swim fast, so you have to keep your line straight in front of you at all times. If they start swimming, you "follow your fish" (which is something you hear yelled at you over and over and over again). So if your line starts pulling off to one side, you run after it. With 10+ lines in the water at any given time, it is a huge adventure to be running around the boat, with a tuna pulling like crazy on your line, trying as hard as you can to duck over and under lines to keep them from getting crossed up with other people's fish. Crazy.

After you get them close to the boat and they tire out enough to stop swimming like mad, then the real work begins. It gets to the point where you can reel all day and NOTHING happens, so you have to "pump your fish." This means you pull your pole up, then reel down the slack over and over and over until you can get the fish up to the top. I would say on average it would take 15-20 minutes per fish to get it on board once you got to this point, but sometimes I would be fighting a fish for 45 minutes or more. It was crazy. Plus, guys have lots more upper body strength than girls, so even though I'm pretty strong, my dad could do all this with one hand, and I had to use both hands to pull my pole up. The whole top of my left thigh was one giant, nasty bruise by the end of the day.

So, once you can see your fish just under the surface of the water, you yell, "COLOR!!!" This basically means you can see the color of your fish and they're close enough to get on board. Tuna are too strong and too fast to effectively get on board with a net, so the deckhand would come running with a gaff hook on the end of a long pole and the two of us would work together to get it close enough to hook it and pull it up.

Tuna are REALLY bloody. I can't explain that enough. My dad had been warned, so we both bought some rubber rain pants, and boy was I glad I had them. When you see a sign that says, "Fresh Bled Tuna," they aren't joking. The deckhands run their fingers under the fish's gills, then turn them upside down in a trash can to bleed them out. It's crazy. They were dumping buckets of blood overboard all day, and you know what that means: SHARKS.

There were TONS of sharks, and there were more and more as the day went on. They were BEAUTIFUL, mostly blue sharks, but it was super annoying when one took your bait and got on your line because that meant you lost your line everytime. :( Most of them were in the 3-4' category, but there were a couple we saw that were 6-7' long. The craziest thing of the day was when one guy was reeling up his tuna, he got it up to the surface and a shark came and took a huge bite of it and took out half the fish. It was amazing. They had to just cut it free, of course, but wow.

I definitely spent lots of time with blood all over me, but they had a hose of seawater running all day long that they would come by and spray off the deck and the walls and us when they had a chance. I got over the bloody part very quickly (thankfully).

Anyway, long story a little shorter, I caught the first fish and the last fish, and I caught more than anybody else on the boat (I got 18 tuna on board!). There is no limit on tuna, so basically we fished until the boat couldn't hold anymore (our boat held roughly 2 tons of fish), and my last fish made 147 on board, each roughly 20-30 lbs. As I was reeling up the last fish (and boy was that one making me work for it!), the captain turned around (everyone else was finished and they were all just watching me) and said, "I'll tell you what, this little girl puts a lot of grown men to shame--I've seen guys after five fish on their knees saying they will NOT pull up another fish." :) That was pretty awesome.

They just split up the fish at the end between everyone, so my dad and I each took home 14 1/2 fish. That is a lot of stinking tuna! :) We froze most of it and canned a little, and it was an amazing trip. Luckily I like fish, and BBQ'ed tuna is DELISH! :)

So there you have it, the most exciting thing I've done in a long, long time. Thanks for the awesome trip, Dad! And someday, maybe I'll be able to show a few photos!