Outdoors : NOTES / PETE THOMAS : ‘Psychic’ Tuna Finally Show Up, Miss Holiday

Nobody is complaining, but there are plenty of boat owners and landing operators scratching their heads over what is happening off the coast.

Tuna, the bread and butter of the San Diego overnight fleet and a booster of business for any boats that can reach the popular game fish, finally decided to move north. And they seem to be popping up everywhere.

It’s as if the fish know that Labor Day signals summer’s end. People, busy again with more mundane pursuits, basically stop fishing on boats that go out for more than half a day.

“It is absolutely like [the tuna] were psychic,” said Bob Fletcher, president of the Sportfishing Assn. of California.

San Diego boats will keep running, however, light loads or not. They are finding the tuna--mostly yellowfin with some bluefin and skipjack--30-60 miles south of Point Loma.

“They’re getting easy limits by 9:30 in the morning,” Fletcher said.

Seaforth Sportfishing’s vessel, the San Diego, found the tuna 19 miles due west on Tuesday and will now run 12-hour trips to the area.

So plentiful are the tuna that one long-range skipper told Fletcher they are being found all down the Baja coast, moving up as though there were a “faucet somebody keeps turning on.”

Even the Los Angeles and Long Beach boats are getting into the act.

The Indian, out of 22nd St. Landing in San Pedro, on a 1 1/2-day trip, found tuna in U.S. waters 80 miles offshore, returning Tuesday morning with 100 yellowfin and two bluefin.

The Toronado out of Long Beach Sportfishing posted a similar count from the same area and is running daily trips leaving at 10 p.m. Most landings with boats capable of reaching the tuna are on similar schedules.

*

For the record: Those who read the fish report in Tuesday morning’s Times and saw that 162 albacore were reported at Gold Coast Sportfishing in Ventura, don’t get your hopes up.

The report was not called in by the landing.

“You guys printed it [but] we didn’t call it in and we don’t know who did,” said Bill Bohannan, a spokesman for the landing. “Our boats aren’t even capable of getting to where the albacore have been.”

Bohannan said he wished the report were true.

“The calls started pouring in at 5 a.m.,” he said Tuesday afternoon. “They overloaded our answering machine. We’ve been returning calls and answering calls constantly since then.”

As for the albacore, they remain 60-plus miles offshore and rough weather has hampered any effort to reach them.

*

Those with plans to fly to Cabo San Lucas this week might want to check before leaving. Hurricane Henriette swept over the resort city at the tip of the Baja peninsula Monday, closing the airport, washing out some roads and inflicting damage, mostly minor, in town.

Greg Whitter, a spokesman for Alaska Airlines, said the airport, about 40 miles north of Cabo San Lucas in San Jose Del Cabo, reopened Tuesday and that travelers experienced “some delays, but that was the extent of it.”

Not quite.

The storm knocked out electricity and telephone service, which had not been restored as of late Tuesday afternoon.

It was not clear what shape Highway 1--the road connecting the city to the airport--was in or how the hotels are dealing with the lack of electricity.

John Doughty of J.D.’s Big Game Tackle on Balboa Island, contacted the skipper of one boat, the High Beam, Tuesday morning on his single-sideband radio.

The skipper told Doughty that most of the damage was rain-related, that a few small boats might have sunk, that road signs in the city were “bent and twisted.” He added that he didn’t know of any fatalities or serious injuries.

In the East Cape region north of Cabo, while several fleets ran their boats to the safety of La Paz harbor, the storm came and went without much of a disruption.

*

Dove hunters hit the fields in force last Friday, as they do every opener, but for some it wasn’t the typical opener.

“It was a nice hunt, but I can’t believe there were hardly any hunters,” said Lowell Kolb of Seal Beach. “It was like a ghost town. There was no splattering of guns, pop, pop, pop . . . “

Actually, there were plenty of hunters. The difference was that they were more scattered than usual. Kolb hunted the San Joaquin Valley, where abundant rainfall during the winter resulted in lots of water and planting in the agricultural areas, giving the birds--and hunters--greater area.

Kolb said hunting was tough, with some hunters getting skunked.

“I came home with five birds, and that was after a full day’s work,” he said.

The ever-popular Imperial Valley was equally tough, thanks to a strong wind that blew the night before the opener, scattering the birds.

Keith Earle, a hunter and golf pro at Rio Bend RV Resort in El Centro, said hunters he talked to averaged six to eight birds apiece.

“It was definitely not easy,” he said. “I had pretty good success, though. I got my limit [10 birds] by 7 a.m.”