Great Expectations Remain Despite Slow Albacore Bite

“A lot of jig fish and no meat,” is one landing operator’s way of saying that things aren’t exactly boiling over on the albacore front.

An occasional tuna is striking a trolled feather, but the fish are refusing the subsequent offering of hooked sardines, so the chaos typically associated with an albacore bite just isn’t happening.

Thus, the impressive counts aren’t appearing in the paper and business--so much of which relies on the printed fish counts--isn’t nearly as brisk as it was last year at this time, when a full-blown albacore blitz was well underway.

On the plus side, the tuna that are biting--boats are averaging 20 to 30 a day--are comfortably close: 35 to 45 miles from San Diego and about 60 miles for the L.A.-based vessels. That they’re within such easy reach of the “L.A. boats,” is not helping business in San Diego, which draws much of its business from the L.A. area.

“But this is just the beginning,” says Tim Thurman, a spokesman at Fisherman’s Landing in San Diego, guessing that more fish are on the way.

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Scratching away at albacore wasn’t cutting it for Vagabond skipper Mike Lacky on Tuesday. He left the sporadic bite, headed southwest toward the 60-mile bank early in the afternoon, spotted a “foamer,” which is an area of game fish pushing bait fish out of the water, and put his 25 anglers on top of a school of highly prized bluefin tuna.

By day’s end, they had boated 71 bluefin weighing 20 to 30 pounds.

“Obviously, we’d love to be catching 50- to 60-pounders, but we take what’s out there,” says Lance Withee, owner of the boat, which runs out of Point Loma Sportfishing.

Asked if it was Lackey’s best bluefin haul of the young season, Withee said, “Golly, he had a day with 100 here a couple of weeks ago.”

The Legend out of Seaforth Sportfishing in San Diego got in on the bluefin bite on Wednesday, posting a similar score.

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He’s not taking credit for the bluefin bite, but Philip Friedman of the information line 976-TUNA, was touting the 60-mile bank two days earlier, based on information he obtained from the pilot of a spotter plane working with commercial fishing vessels.

Friedman has begun using spotter plane “dope” to improve the accuracy of his daily reports. Another pilot told him Tuesday “of seeing more albacore than at any time during the past week, but they’re just not biting today.”

Or Wednesday. Or Thursday. Will today be the day?

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The long-standing white seabass bite, the most productive in recent history, may get even better today as the seasonal bag limit increases from one to three. One-fish limits had been common all week at Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz and, occasionally, Santa Barbara islands.

Greedy fishermen shouldn’t get their hopes up, however. If the water--currently 63 to 66 degrees--gets much warmer at the islands, the squid will disappear and fishing for the finicky croakers will get very tough.

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Not too many fish reports come this way via Alaska, but Ken Mangen of Chino Hills checks in with the catch of the week: a 324-pound halibut he caught off Sitka while fishing with Kingfisher Charters.

It falls well short of the all-tackle world-record 459-pounder caught farther north at Dutch Harbor in 1996, but it’s the largest of the year for the Kingfisher fleet.

“I hooked him at 480 feet, so I knew I had a long way to go,” Mangen says of a fight that lasted a surprisingly short 45 minutes.

He has a long way to go toward polishing off all those fillets too.

“Luckily I have a huge freezer,” he says.

UNBEARABLE

Bear stories are coming out of the woods. The latest involves a Redondo Beach trio--Colin Williams, Doug Pagh and Scott Howell--on a camping-fishing trip near Upper Twin Lake in the Bridgeport area.

Hardly an hour had passed before the first bear got into their goods.

“We had put all our coolers under the picnic table and we came back and found everything trashed: the bread, cookies, chips. . . . Luckily, he didn’t get into our big cooler where all the meat was,” says Williams, 37.

The bear got its meat, swiping two steaks off a grill vacated only briefly by nearby campers.

“The guy went away for some beans or something and the bear came in and grabbed both steaks with one hand,” Williams says.

The campers were forced to store their coolers in the bed of a truck covered with a camper shell, and to back the truck against the tree to keep the bears from opening the latch.

“On the last night we had the tailgate down and the coolers inside while we were cooking dinner,” Williams says. “I needed some salt and pepper and wandered over with a lantern, about 20 feet from the fire, and this big bear was standing there with his arms inside the truck dragging the cooler out just like a human would.”

GOING DOWNHILL?

Preliminary figures show there were 51.6 million skier-snowboarder days nationwide in 1999-2000, compared with 51.9 million in 1998-99. It was the second consecutive decline and it has many within the industry worried.

“To say we don’t have a problem would be naive,” says Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Assn.

In California, skier visits last season totaled about 6.5 million, compared to 7.4 million the previous season. However, many of the larger resorts matched or exceeded revenues attained the previous year.

“Economically, we were fairly close to last year, even though attendance was off 10%-11%,” says Bob Roberts, executive director of the California Ski Industry Assn.

Roberts says skier visits alone do not provide an accurate assessment of the industry’s health, since so much depends on the weather. He adds that California, with the larger resorts spending millions on improvements, “is in pretty good shape.”

In fact, resorts such as Heavenly, Squaw and Mammoth--which has plans for commercial air service--enjoyed excellent seasons and are more attractive than ever as destination resorts attracting foreign tourists.

Colorado, on the other hand, seems to be faltering and poor snow seasons haven’t helped. A fledgling Steamboat Springs insurance company has begun offering “weather insurance” to resorts.

Gina Kroft, spokeswoman for Crested Butte in Colorado, said the resort will submit a claim soon. Crested Butte drew 10.3% fewer skiers than the year before. Vail Resorts has already been paid $10.6 million, and the insurance company, MDM Group Associates Inc., said it may pay out more than $25 million nationally.

“Colorado has been hit hard two years in a row,” Roberts says.

WINDING UP

A 17-year-old Redding resident is in hot water with wildlife officials, who want the Shasta County Probation Department to bring charges against him for killing a bald eagle at Shasta Lake.

Witnesses reported hearing 30 to 40 gun shots, seeing the bird fall from the sky and then seeing the boy with a semi-automatic rifle in his hand.

Bald eagles are threatened federally and endangered in California. State law provides for a maximum sentence of a year in jail and a $5,000 fine. Federal law allows for a two-year sentence and $250,000 fine.