Things People Do : ALBACORE! : Few Sport Fish Cause More Excitement, and They’re Now Within Striking Distance

Fishermen describe it as the ultimate tug-of-war, a battle won with guile as well as muscle, one in which the adversary doesn’t pull just in the opposite direction, but in every direction.

It is also a struggle the opponent will often cut short, declaring himself the winner, by sawing the rope in half, thus giving birth to another story about the one that got away.

The game is albacore, and it’s something fishermen insist should be experienced by everyone at least once in a lifetime.

“They’re probably the most exciting fish you can catch, unless you go on a nine-day trip,” said Scott Miesel, who captains the Vagabond out of Point Loma Sportfishing.

The game is only half of it. Fishermen also are quick to point out that albacore are one of the ocean’s tastiest offerings.

Together, the albacore’s fighting nature and culinary rewards make the tuna the most coveted fish off the local coast.

But there has been a problem of late, a big one. For the past four summers, albacore have not migrated into local waters. They haven’t migrated, period.

“I was beginning to think we might have caught them all,” said Pug Jones, 59, a San Diego-based writer who covers the sportfishing industry for several magazines.

Note that Jones used the past tense. She made her observation having just returned from a four-day expedition some 230 miles southeast of San Diego to a point known as The Cross.

An ocean cross is simply the point at which longitudinal and latitudinal lines converge. What distinguishes this cross is its location on top of fertile feeding waters that usually attract yellowtail tuna and are currently doing the same with albacore.

Jones and 12 other fishermen hooked more than 300 in two days of fishing near The Cross over the weekend, making it the most successful albacore run in years.

Jones no longer fears for the albacore’s demise, having hauled in so many that she began cutting yellowtail off her line.

“For the first time in my life, I quit yellowtail fishing,” she said.

The raw number of albacore caught was not the only bit of good news. Also exciting to the fishermen--and to the sportfishing industry for which albacore is the lifeblood--was the fact that these particular albacore, eight to 12 pounds in size, were hitting on tackle with up to 60-pound test line.

Deep-sea fish tend to hit only on much lighter line, say 20-pound test, because the heavier line weighs down the live bait and make it look unnatural, if not dead.

This albacore’s hunger indicates that its population is larger than the available food-base.

“They’re coming this way,” Jones said, beaming. “There is a lot of food (at The Cross ), but there’s more fish.”

Others aren’t so sure about an imminent migration.

Miesel, whose Vagabond was the first San Diego boat to land an albacore this season, thinks it will be some time before the albacore make their way up the coast.

“There’s just a lot of different kinds of food out there,” Miesel said. “That’s why I think they’re not going to move for at least a month. But hopefully they will move up so the guys can catch them on the one-day trips.”

Fishermen who now want albacore have to take at least a three-day cruise and shell out between $400 and $600. Such a trip on Miesel’s Vagabond, which has had some early success, goes for $495. Boats out of H&M; Landing are charging $400.

On the Vagabond’s last trip to The Cross , the albacore and yellowtail bite was described as an absolute frenzy.

“The kinds of bait you used didn’t even matter,” said Camarillo’s Barry Miller, 33. “Anything you put on the line, the albacore would jump on it. We were even catching fish on empty hooks--it was that wide open.”

Albacore were hitting all day last Saturday. On Sunday, they hit only in the early morning and late evening.

The difference was that the sun failed to burn through the offshore clouds on Saturday, drawing the feeding layer upward. The albacore simply followed the layer, made up of squid and other marine life.

That was when the fun began.

“You could see the fish come up and take your line,” Eggers said. “The strength they have is just unreal. They were popping 30-pound line.”

“They were really scrappy,” Jones added. “For their size (eight-10 pounds), they were fighting like 30-pounders. They were just in a frenzy.”

Said Steve Riggs, 31, of Pacific Beach: “As soon as your bait hit the water, you were hooked up. In fact, some hooks weren’t even hitting the water, and they were getting hit.”

“When everybody has one hooked, it’s just crazy,” Miller said. “The fish will go under the boat, out to sea . . . you’ve got to move around the boat with them. Everybody’s jumping over each other or ducking underneath. It really tests your talent if you can keep up with all the excitement.”

The fishermen who can’t keep up often find themselves having to retie their hooks.

“When you get fish going every which way,” Riggs said, “they’ll cut each other loose.”

Up until Miesel’s boat landed the first albacore some three weeks ago, it appeared the tuna had cut themselves off from coastal waters on a permanent basis. They had been missing for three summers. In fact, no one’s even sure if the albacore will keep biting and continue their migration toward San Diego waters this season.

The Southwest Fisheries Center in La Jolla says the main factor keeping albacore out of area waters is a large plume of cold, murky water that stretches some 200 miles off the coast from Point Conception to Ensenada.

Another factor for the missing albacore, some fishing experts say, is the growth of gill-net fishing by commercial fleets from Asian nations. The nets, which can be up to 35 miles long and 25 feet deep, are very efficient at catching fully grown tuna but also snare everything else that happens by, including young albacore.

The San Diego sportfishing fleet goes after the same population of tuna, according to a spokesperson from the Southwest Fisheries Center. The young albacore, the theory goes, simply are given no chance to migrate toward the Southern California coast.

Whether that is actually the case is still hotly debated between environmentalists and gill-net fishing nations.

But optimism over the return of albacore has been spurred by Michael Laurs, a scientist at the Southwest Fisheries Center and author of a biweekly albacore bulletin. Laurs reported that conditions are right for albacore to return to coastal waters for the first time since the El Nino condition in 1985.

According to Laurs’ bulletin, the conditions responsible for luring albacore are warmer ocean temperatures and clearer water that has replaced the three-year-old cold-water plume.

From what local anglers have caught so far, it would seem Laurs was on target.

“I love albacore on a barbecue,” Riggs said. “And I haven’t seen any in three or four years. When I heard they were biting, I had to get in on it.”