The Year's First Little Tunny

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

No, not Christmas, Fall. 

In the fall along the shoreline in Southern New England, life is as concentrated as it can ever be. And it doesn't last long. There's a sense of urgency to this time of year, the idea that if you skip out on even two days in a row you've missed something remarkable. In a sense that's true, you'd be hard pressed to find a day in September or October during which somewhere between New York City and Provincetown there isn't something remarkable transpiring.

Maximizing time is paramount. 

The window to catch false albacore lasts two months if we're lucky, and overlaps some of prime times to target big bass. As such, I like to try to get as many albies early on in the run as possible. So far so good this year, I've targeted them exactly once and got two...

In 12 hours of fishing. 

Some days are just brutal. This past Saturday was frustrating because I was trying to get my friend Brandon on his first hardtails and the deck just wasn't stacked in our favor. I'd hoped the forecast for relatively reasonable wind and swell would verify, it ended up being really sporty out there for two kayakers. It wasn't dangerous, really, it just made it almost impossible to fish. That really sucked, because there were a ton of bonito and Spanish mackerel around and we just couldn't catch them. We ended up leaving CT after a few schoolies and cocktail blues. We bounced east, bumped into Phil Sheffield at one of the inlets, saw very little life, the got to the West Wall to a few bent rods. It was a blind casting day, fish showed very little. But they were around, and we got shots. I was able to capitalize on them. Brandon was not. That was probably as frustrating for me as it was for him, especially since I know how this works. I watched him try to rationalize why he wasn't catching knowing full well that the reasons were too minute for me to just explain them, him to get it, then just start catching. A beginner has nothing to place confidence in except what people around them are doing, and I wasn't on any sort of pattern my two fish came on two different flies and the two other fish I missed took two other different flies. Time spent changing flies, thinking about flies, thinking about depth, thinking about line, thinking about tippet, or moving around just takes one's mind away from the task at hand. That task, very simply in the scenario that often occurs at the wall, is to make long casts and fast two hand retrieves until your arms are ready to fall off and be constantly mentally prepared for little tunny to grab the fly and to deal with the chaos that will follow. 

We were on the wall for six hours. I stopped casting for brief spells, in part because I didn't feel the need to catch a bunch of fish, partly because I had to write the previous blog post, and partly because it's exhausting and I wanted to fish the next couple days without arm and back pain.

After a while we made a move to where I knew some fish would set up on the incoming tide and launched kayaks again. We got a couple shots but not good ones. We got off the water just before sunset. This season beats the piss out of me, mentally and physically, but I'd put more time in if I could. I was one the water from 9:00 to 2:30 today, I'd be there right now if I could, and at dawn tomorrow. If I had a vehicle right now, I'd basically be living in it and driving wherever the stripers and albies take me from late August to mid November, with stops to work in between bites.
Life doesn't last. The fall run is a microcosm of that.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

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