LOOKING FOR A GOOD FIGHT? : THROW A HOOK ON HIGH SEAS : An Educator Has Taught Himself the Delicate Art of Ocean Fly Fishing

Nick Curcione, his fly rod rigged up, was ready to start fishing. But just as he began to start casting, someone suggested that the brisk wind that had just begun to blow had rendered conditions unsatisfactory.

Curcione all but sneered. He began casting, and made surprisingly long, accurate casts into a wind that was chopping up whitecaps on the ocean.

The ocean? Fly fishing on the ocean? What’s going on here?

“If you want to get into saltwater fly fishing, you’ve got to learn to cope with wind,” Curcione said. “I know fresh-water fly fishermen wouldn’t think of going fishing when it’s windy. But out here, on the ocean, you’ve almost always got wind. You have to learn to live with it.”

Curcione and his fishing pal, Rick Petronave, were on Petronave’s 53-foot sportfisher, “Amberjack.” They were about eight miles off Long Beach, in one of the blue-water shipping lanes. Catalina’s chalk cliffs had just appeared through the rising morning mist.

Curcione and Petronave were fishing intensely in a school of big Pacific mackerel that were zipping back and forth, under the boat. The water was exceptionally clear and the fish could be seen 15 feet beneath the boat.

Curcione had caught a few mackerel with a homemade white marabou and Mylar fly, when something suddenly put a deep bend in his 8 1/2-foot fly rod. “Hey, that’s no mackerel,” he said.

The fish raced back and forth across the stern, unsuccessfully sought deeper water, then began to tire. It appeared to be a fish roughly the same size as the big mackerel, but was putting up triple the fight. Finally, Curcione had the mysterious little fighter on the deck.

“Oh, it’s a bullet tuna,” he said. “They’ve been around for a couple of weeks, I’ve heard. It’s a small tuna family member. I hear they never grow larger than 2 1/2 or 3 pounds. Hey, here’s something to check out--is this the first bullet tuna ever taken on a fly? Are we talking historic achievement here?”

Laughing, he dropped the little tuna into the cooler.

Curcione, when he isn’t fly fishing the Southern California surf someplace or fishing off a boat, is the chairman of the sociology department at Loyola Marymount University, and admits to tying an occasional fly in his office.

On this particular day, he was seeking sharks. He’s caught hammerheads, makos and blues on his flies, and he was armed with a collection of his feathered creations with stainless steel hooks secured by wire leaders. His flies were red, white and yellow patterns. Some had Christmas tinsel woven into the pattern, to make the fly resemble a shimmering anchovy underwater.

He’d also brought a big cooler filled with assorted fish parts, from old mackerel to months-old albacore he’d thawed out the previous day. He cut the bigger parts into chunks, put them in a wire basket, tied it to a rope and dropped it overboard. It splashed, just at the water line, leaching a constant trail of fish oil, blood, scales and small parts behind the drifting boat.

For shark fishermen, such chumming is normally a reliable means of attracting sharks. Curcione said his method has attracted as many as three dozen sharks at the same time to the boat. But this day, as luck would have it, would prove sharkless. As the hour passed, Curcione relieved the tedium by tricking a few more bullet tuna with his flies.

Curcione, 42, is something of a pioneer. A native of White Plains, N.Y., he first started fly fishing the ocean in the early 1960s. In the east, he pursued the sport on Long Island Sound, fishing for striped bass and bluefish.

He moved to Southern California in 1973 and began plying the prime ocean fly fishing beaches at Huntington Beach, Hermosa Beach, Oxnard and Oceanside.

Many an old-timer, armed with a standard spin fishing rig, has been startled to see Curcione, carrying his fly rod and wearing a plastic waste basket, in which he stored shooting line, strapped to his hip. But if he cut an unorthodox figure, Curcione more often than not left conventional anglers scratching their heads.

“I’ll never forget the time about eight years ago, at Hermosa Beach,” Curcione said.

“I showed up next to this old Japanese guy who I’d seen around, I knew he was a very good surf fisherman. He was doing the standard stuff, throwing out a hunk of mussel about 80 yards with a 12-foot surf rod and a spinning rod.

“Anyhow, I started wading in the water, flicking flies in and out of the surf near him and he started laughing at me, as if to say: ‘What kind of crazy outfit do you call that?’

“Well, within 15 minutes I pulled out two good size corbina, three and four pounds, I think. The old guy couldn’t believe it, it blew him away.

“See, in those days, saltwater fly fishing was a novelty. There just weren’t many of us around. You had a hell of a time finding a tackle store that had saltwater fly fishing gear. Ten years ago, on a great day of bonito fishing in Redondo Harbor, you’d see a half dozen fly fishermen at the most, casting for bonito from little skiffs. This summer one day, I saw 40 fly fishermen from just one club.”

Redondo Harbor, he pointed out, is a hotbed for beginning, intermediate and advanced saltwater fly fishermen. It’s a prime area mostly because it’s favored by one of the Pacific Coast’s superb little gamesters, the bonito. A member of the Spanish mackerel family, the bonito is a superb fighter, commonly reaching sizes of 2 to 12 pounds along the California coast.

“The reason you often find them in Redondo Harbor is because they’re attracted by the many bait receivers in there, and also the hot water outflow pipe at the power plant,” Curcione said. “It’s a good place to find saltwater fly fishermen, to find out how to get some instruction.”

Curcione cautions beginners to seek instruction first.

“For the simple reason that the hooks we use in saltwater fly fishing . . . are so much bigger than fresh-water fly fishing gear, there’s an element of danger,” he said. “I put one of these things through my ear one time. Fly fishing is like tennis or golf, in that you do need some instruction. The casting motion isn’t something you can teach yourself.

“And you should never cast a saltwater fly rig without glasses on.”

Later in the day, Petronave started up the Amberjack and moved it to the Horseshoe Kelp area, a 7- to 8-square mile area off San Pedro where the water is relatively shallow, only 85 feet at one point, on the edge of a deep canyon. It was mid-afternoon. The wind had raised a chop on the water.

“I’ve caught calico bass, barracuda, yellowtail and white sea bass here on flies,” Curcione said, casting another feathered creation off the stern. “It’s always best to be here in the early morning, when it’s flat. The wind always comes up in the afternoon.”

Curcione had a marabou streamer attached to a foot-long wire leader, which was attached to a 30-foot shooting lead-core line. Next was 100 feet of coated shooting line, which was backed up by 300 yards of 30-pound-test Dacron line.

He was letting the fly sink for 5 to 10 seconds, then yanking it out of the water for another cast.

“If there’s not much current, I can get the fly down 50 or 60 feet,” he said. “Now, It’s only down about 25.”

It was a beautiful afternoon. Dark clouds rolled in off the ocean but the afternoon sun illuminated much of the land. The landmarks were the Palos Verdes peninsula, the Vincent Thomas bridge and the white dome that houses Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose. From the sea, the Goose’s home makes it look as if Long Beach has a domed stadium.

Curcione said he has caught nearly every Southern California and Mexico sport fish on flies.

“I’ve even caught halibut on flies, in Marina del Rey and Baja California,” he said. “I’ve caught all the basses, including white sea bass; mako sharks, yellowfin tuna on the long range trips out of San Diego, and dorado and sailfish.”

But some of his most enjoyable days have been spent in the surf, he said.

“I tie a lot of patterns that imitate sand crabs,” he said. “Some others look like blood worms or shrimp. What you’re looking for are barred surf perch. January is a good month, that’s when the big females are around. Casting isn’t as critical as a lot of conventional surf fishermen would have you believe. A lot of those guys with big spinning rods look like they’re in casting contests.

“Sixty to 80 feet is sufficient. Heck, I’ve caught fish right in front of a shore breaker, in water so shallow you could see a big corbina’s back sticking out of the water. Sometimes, big surf conditions are best because the fish are active. The surf tears up the bottom, digging up food for the fish.

“Barred surf perch aren’t spooked by people in the water. Sometimes you can see them near you in the water, chasing crabs. But corbina sometimes are spooked.”

The Department of Fish and Game estimates that barred surf perch account for about 75% of the Southland surf fishing catch.

Curcione cautions surf fly fishermen to be wary of high surf while wearing waders.

“If it’s a cold-water time of year and you’ve got waders on, I’d recommend not going in over knee deep,” he said. “You can get in serious trouble on a rough surf day if a wave fills up your waders.”