Brian Maguire of Portland weighs fish with an on-board scale to separate the five heaviest tuna allowed for entry into the Oregon Tuna Classic at Ilwaco, Wash.
ILWACO, Wash. -- At 5 a.m., port and starboard bow lights dance, gleaming through light fog from a long line of powerful boats meandering out the narrow channel.
They dodge and weave in each other's wakes like a red and green Christmas string blowing in the wind.
Except even Rudolph can't lead these maniacal reindeer to the same rooftop. Each skipper of the bobbing boats astern has a grip on his helm, an eye on his global positioning system ... and a course in his head.
The Oregon Tuna Classic is glowing again in its fourth season; it's the angel, the star on top of the tree, summer's gift of giving from a fleet of unique Oregon anglers. By the end of the month, Oregon Food Bank distribution centers statewide will find their off-season stockings filled with tens of thousands of dollars and tons of donated and canned albacore tuna.
Clearing the breakwater, the line of boats spreads across the notorious Columbia River bar and collects in a cluster just east of a Coast Guard "47," the agency's go-to 47-foot cutter.
At 6 a.m., a red flare shoots into the sky from its deck. All 70 boats erupt toward the gray western horizon.
Milton Gudgell of Pacific Salmon Charters, picking his way behind the pack while skippering a boatload of coho salmon customers, will later recall: "All I saw was white; white boats, white wakes, a roar of engines ... It was like a big white fan."
"We'll be by ourselves in a few minutes," says an unperturbed Mike Colbach, shoving forward the throttles of his twin-engined, 35-foot Shake N Bake.
The Portland lawyer settles back into his seat atop the flying bridge as the boat quickly planes at 22 knots, plunging into a light swell. It's a two-hour ride west by southwest to the coordinates he's chosen 50 miles off Seaside. Friends caught fish there the day before.
Below, his crew breaks out a forest of stiff rods and shiny reels and stirs the water in a bait well filled with live anchovies before settling in for the ride.
At 8:15 a.m., Colbach throttles back to eight knots. "Let's fish!" he shouts.
Clark Vonessen of Eugene and Mike Piazza of Vancouver are the ramrods, choosing the lures and setting first-strike rods in the right holders. John Cooney and Brian Maguire of Portland and Scott Heusch of Eugene are the muscle, tending the catches and pulling hard-fighting tuna to the gaff.
Within minutes, the first rod dances. "FISH ON!" shouts just about everyone as the deck becomes a melee of rods, bodies and motion.
Colbach backs up the boat a little, then shoves the gear into neutral, looking to the water for telltale swirls of schooled tuna.
Below, live anchovy are tossed into the blue sea. "BOIL!" Colbach shouts as he spots tuna, savagely slashing through the hapless baitfish. Everyone rigs live anchovies onto small hooks and gets lines in the water.
One, two, three rods are hit and throbbing lines tighten enough to sing. We pass over, under, around each other to keep things straight, but there are tangles, sliced leaders and organized chaos before the first few tuna are flopping on the deck.
By 9 a.m., five fish are in the box. By the end of the day, 15 more will join them in flurries of action across a 10-square mile plot.
The last is gaffed at 1:15 p.m. and Colbach fires Shake N Bake back to 22 knots to meet the 4 p.m. check-in deadline.
The fish are carefully weighed on boat scales. Tournament rules allow the five heaviest to be weighed, then awards $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 prizes to the top three teams. Typically, winners donate their prizes to the cause.
Colbach's crew is jubilant with what they believe are five fish heavier than 20-30 pounds. They could be in the money.
Ashore, though, a far-more accurate scale shows theirs was nearly 10 pounds off and Shake N Bake finishes just a respectable 16th.
"Still not so bad," says Colbach with a smile. Their 20 tuna place the team well within the top 10 for total catches. "It's not about the money."
The Aug. 1 Ilwaco event, the second of four scheduled this season, drew a record 78 entries and the 70 boats meeting the call at the shotgun start ended the day donating more than $10,000 and 6,000 pounds to the cause.
"We've just about doubled our donations each year," said Del Stephens, OTC chairman. "This will put us a little over 10,000 pounds;last year we raised $46,000 and 13,000 pounds (in three events). If we'reable to hold even one of the other two (weather dependent; Aug. 15 in Charleston and Aug. 29 in Garibaldi), we'll go higher again."
So far, tuna and the weather have cooperated. While fish were schooled 50 miles out of Ilwaco last week, they've been hanging much closer to Charleston this summer. Stephens said albacore were within 14 miles of the harbor and earlier this past week tuna were caught within 35 miles of Garibaldi.
Dean Ferguson of Astoria, port captain for the OTC'sIlwaco event, said city officials visiting the big top dinner after Saturday'sfishing told him "this was the biggest day we've had in town in five years!"
Ferguson credited the Tuna Classic's eager participants with creating winners for both charity and community.
"It's just me talking," he said, "but I can easily envision a year or two down the road this whole thing morphing into a Northwest Tuna Classic."