Paddy hoppers key on Baja tuna frenzy

Skipper MARKUS

Medak is on a hot streak. Since Labor Day, he has hauled anglers from San Diego to tuna grounds off northern Baja to slay about 100 yellowfin tuna or yellowtail daily.

The New Lo-An rumbles all night under a round moon obscured by clouds. Some anglers snore in bunks, others too excited to sleep play cards or rig tackle, until the skipper cuts the diesel engines and sets the boat adrift west of Ensenada. The eastern sky blushes pink, men grab rods and poke at sardines swirling in the bait tank.

The San Diego sportfishing fleet is tapped into a vein of yellowfin flowing northward on warm current. Anglers call it the most wide-open bite in years, yielding spirited, if not big, fish. Some of the buzz:

* “The Big Game 90 returns from a four-day trip with 23 yellowfin, 180 yellowtail, one dorado, 38 big bonito, 41 barracuda and six ling cod,” trumpets the saltwater report at www.976-tuna.com.

* “Overnight boats out of San Diego are doing very well on yellowfin tuna to 15-0, dorado to 20-0, and small yellowtail to 5-0,” reports Mike Bennett of Outdoor News Service.

* Anglers aboard San Diego boats had caught 23,924 yellowfin this year, as of Thursday -- five times more than last year and the most in five years, according to Chad Wood, owner of Chatsworth-based www.sportfishingreports.com, which tracks historical fish counts along the California coast. Yellowtail and dorado catches are way up this year too, he says.

* “This is one of the best years I’ve seen. We’ve hit spots where the bite was wide open and fish were just about jumping in the boat for two hours,” says Mel Barauskas of Montrose, who fished Sept. 29 aboard the New Lo-An.

The late-season yellowfin run culminates a year of solid saltwater fishing off Southern California. Anglers gorged on albacore in spring. “There were not limits on every boat every day, but the albacore were big fish. It was good,” says Katrina Rutkauskas, manager of H&M; Landing at Pt. Loma. In July and August, yellowtail to 30 pounds swarmed the Coronado Islands and many persist at Catalina and San Clemente islands. A flurry of dorado, or mahi-mahi, breezed up the San Diego coast in September.

And it’s not over. Rutkauskas expects yellowfin from 25 to 40 pounds to follow smaller fish north from Baja. Tim Barnett, climate researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, predicts a mild El Nino this winter that could help fishing as warm water pulses east across the equatorial Pacific toward California.

Computer screens that track fish, weather and other boats jam the wheelhouse of the New Lo-An, but Medak nods to the most telling instrument: the digital thermometer, water temperature 70 degrees. Yellowfin cruise the Pacific soaking up warm water and searching for floating debris such as kelp paddies that storms dislodge.

Medak, 32, has worked on fishing boats most of his life and earned a degree in fisheries management from Humboldt State. He’s seen some of the warmest water in years off San Diego.

“These fish key on structure, and floating kelp is the only structure out there,” he says squinting across an expanse of featureless blue water. At dawn, he fires the engines and begins “paddy hopping.” The plan is simple: find kelp, fly-line a lively sardine, hang on tight.

The technique works to deadly effect as Medak parks beside a tennis court-size paddy at 7:15 a.m. Anglers toss sardine-tipped hooks overboard, the bait makes three swimmies in the water and dies in the jaws of lunging tuna. Yellowfin swarm the boat like underwater hornets, streaking gray bullets gobbling baited hooks, bending rods in half and screeching reel drags. But anglers remain quiet, intense, transfixed as the food chain erupts just beyond their toes. Fish flash color, men yell “gaff, gaff!” as Medak and his crew scramble about the fantail, skewering and scattering yellowfin on the floor. Tuna die on autopilot, furiously beating their tails on the deck until dumped into a 34-degree cooler for the ride home. Medak pilots between kelp paddies all day. Ten fish here, 30 fish at the next paddy, six at the next one, 25 on a big paddy. By 2 p.m., 110 yellowfin and a 20-pound jackpot dorado lay on ice, the work of 22 anglers. No one even counts the scores of firecracker yellowtail and skipjack tuna anglers toss back. Exhausted, the anglers bunk below as Medak steers the New Lo-An north, back to port for fuel, food and bait for the next day.

To read previous Fair Game columns, go to latimes.com/outdoors.