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6 Ranch Podcast
6 Ranch Podcast
Spearfishing for Tuna on the Oregon Coast
Meet Jacob Perry, who is challenging fishing guiding norms. Learn about commercial sea cucumber diving in Alaska: the equipment, demanding conditions, and market dynamics of this industry. We talk about the history of geoduck harvesting and fishing for Albacore Tuna off the Oregon coast. Hear firsthand accounts of encounters with marine life, spearfishing, and gain valuable tips for your next fishing adventure.
Learn more about Jacob on his WEBSITE. You can also reach out to him at 541-274-9387.
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Check out NICKS BOOTS and use code 6ranch for a free gift.
I didn't know that we were like the fifth group to ever do it successfully. I didn't know that. I mean, I just assumed it was something people did. You know, I'm not tapped into the spearfishing world by any. I've never done it, I've never freedove, and what I'm doing is far different, you know, in the diving world, these are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands.
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Speaker 1:It's basically a water slug man. They are related to starfish and sea urchins, Okay. But yeah, it's kind of a gelatinous water balloon that walks on the bottom of the ocean and what?
Speaker 2:what oceans do they live in? So there's got to be a bunch of different kinds of them, I'd assume.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I don't know how many varieties there are, but there's a lot, yeah, and they're found all over the world. So I think in all of the oceans, is my understanding, although I'm only familiar with the ones in the north pacific yeah, okay, so tell me about it.
Speaker 2:Like, give me the rundown on sea cucumbers. Uh, the commercial harvesting, the sustainability, what people do with them all that.
Speaker 1:So my experience is, is just with alaska, through state of alaska it's.
Speaker 2:It's a dive industry where we're diving to the bottom and, uh, picking them up by hand, putting them in a bag, one at a time and what people have heard a lot of from me is free diving where I'm wearing big, long fins and masks, sn snorkel, wetsuit, weight belt and kicking down to the bottom. The diving you're talking about is relatively specific.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a far different thing, so it's considered hookah. We're diving off of an airline and I wear a full face mask, a dry suit and 70 pounds of lead. We're no fins 70 pounds of lead and 70 pounds of lead Wear no fins.
Speaker 2:70 pounds of lead. 70 pounds of lead. How do you?
Speaker 1:have that distributed All in a weight belt, in a commercial weight belt with a release?
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Wear it high on your hips.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's got to hurt.
Speaker 1:On the surface.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, On the bottom, if it's fitted right, you actually. It's just part of the deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of equipment. So I still wear an air tank, a small one. It just has a bailout. Okay, I've got a manifold on my harness, so you wear a backpack style harness that's got D rings on your chest where you're clipping your bags off to. You clip your airline off to that because your tender can pull you back to the boat.
Speaker 1:or you can pull on the boat and you don't want that any, or you can get tangled up yeah you don't want any pulling on your mask, so you clip, you know, to your harness, off a d-ring on the on the line and then it comes up to your mask.
Speaker 2:Um so you've got a hose connecting you to some kind of tank on the boat that's mixing the air so it's um.
Speaker 1:We have a really good system. We have um everything's hydraulically driven off the main engine of the boat. Okay, so um two hydraulic ptos off the cam, cam driven ptos.
Speaker 2:It's a detroit um ptos like the spinny thing on the back of a tractor that makes implements work correct yeah, yeah, so we engage two ptos that are running hydraulic systems.
Speaker 1:Um, you have, we have a cooler. That's basically a I don't know what it is a couple hundred feet of coiled copper line that we put over the side in the water to keep our system cold because we're running. So we also I don't, but the boat operates as a geoduck dive boat as well, where we're using. So two systems. One runs an air compressor that's below deck to a tank so it draws fresh air intake off the compressor, and then we have a nitrox mixing system. So we've got we buy aviators oxygen and the large k size you know like looks like a welding bottle or whatever a gas bottle, and we have three of those on the back deck with a regulator so it's taking the regular atmosphere from the sea, compressing that and then adding oxygen to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's enriched oxygen, so we're usually setting for 32 percent and normal atmosphere. Oxygen is like eight percent or something no, I think it's in the 20s it's in the 20s, 22 or 23, yeah I know that when I'm doing it every day, because you zero your your meter okay atmospheric, and then uh, test what we're compressing okay, so uh, are you near shore at this point?
Speaker 1:so southeast alaska, for people that don't know, is like basically a giant series of islands, peninsulas, bays, um, you know, prince of wales, island's not a huge island, but well, no, it is a huge island. I think it's the second biggest in the country or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, behind the big island of alaska, of hawaii takes a minute to drive across prince of wales yeah, yeah, and it's got a massive amount of shoreline because it's, you know, jagged bays, little crooks, you know outlying islands, um, we dive all over that, that southeast area. So sometimes we're based out of ketchikan, sometimes we're based out of, like, the craig side, okay, um, all the way up to sitka. So a lot of what we do is, yeah, it's near shore, but it might be a a day boat ride or a 12-hour boat ride or whatever gotcha to the and then, how deep a water are you dropping down into?
Speaker 1:So the the shallower, the better, because you can stay down longer and work more. Um, but I would say average is like 40. Um, I've been to 90, kind of by mistake. We kind of do like we do seventies and eighties and um with. So we're dry suit diving, we're not in wet suits and you start getting a lot of weird pressures.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do you equalize with a full face mask?
Speaker 1:So there's a V-shaped block in your mask that sits just below your nose. Different masks have different, so my dad's mask actually has a lever that flips a little deal and plugs your nose. Mine just has a V-shaped rubber block that sits just below your nose and you palm the whole mask and shove it into your face.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And clear. Yeah, clear your ears.
Speaker 2:Yeah, clear your ears, wow. Okay, so you're somewhere between 40 and 90 feet of water walking around on the bottom of the ocean in southeast Alaska. I imagine water temperatures are in the 50s.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, when we start in October they are, when we finish in January, like 42 to 45. Yeah, real cold water. Yeah, there's been days that in the back bays that we're getting into that they'll have freshwater streams that run into them and the freshwater stays on top a little bit before it mixes and we'll break ice with the boat.
Speaker 2:Are sea cucumbers hard to find?
Speaker 1:Not necessarily so. In the good areas they're plentiful. Man, you get your pounds in a day, um, no problem. Uh, in the tougher areas it's a lot of running around. So we we spend a day or two before season before each opener in our areas, um, with an underwater camera, surveying and just marking marking spots. You know, make it great and waypoints commercial.
Speaker 2:Commercial fishing in Alaska is the most regulated fishery I know of anywhere in the world. Yeah and uh. Anytime that you have a commercial interest, there's going to be all kinds of political attention, political tension around it and there is all that. But when we're talking about openers in Alaska for fish, some of those openers could only be a couple hours long, yeah, and you've got boats that are sitting there waiting and then satcom or radio goes out and says you know, this is the opener, this is the, the quota or the time period, and everybody just goes like crazy. Is it like that for sea cucumbers?
Speaker 1:similar. So no satcom or radio transmissions where when they open the season there's within a region, they break it up into areas like maybe this sound or this bay, and they give you know real, defined borders. And then there's a quota for pounds, what the state defines as sustainable harvest, and each it's a three-year rotation. So what we, what we dove last year, we won't dive again for three years okay, so is that about how old the sea cucumbers are?
Speaker 1:you know I don't know the age of them. Yeah, um, but but yeah, I think it's, uh, it's partially that it just kind of lets the area recover, yeah, um, after a commercial harvest. So they the state fisheries board and the local level fish and game um, when the quote is defined, they then say okay, we're, we, we think we're going to have this many divers, we think we're going to have this much pressure. Generally, your areas are open monday at 8 am till 2 pm. Tuesday, 8 to noon. Okay, um, now, as the season progresses, and even actually early on some of the really good areas, they're going to say you only get monday, no, there's no tuesday, or um, and then, as the as the quota diminishes, they can see okay, there's been 10 boats with 15 divers working this area. They're, they're averaging this many pounds a week out of the area. We don't have enough quota for the year left to sustain that, so they'll cut our window back. So maybe, instead of you know, instead of the day and a half, you get one day, or maybe they just give you a half a day, or the opposite happens.
Speaker 1:Some of these bigger areas that aren't getting the pressure they want, they want to take the quota because that's what's sustainable, that's what I mean. That's that's the goal for the fishery. That we're, you know, is we want to pull that quota out and not have the fishery go into march or april or may. The ideally. I mean they kind of, I think, want to have cucumbers done by the christmas break. Usually we're going into january and sometimes february, but but they want to get that quota before it's. They go down deeper in the summers and do some different things. So they want to get that quota and that's what it's regulated for.
Speaker 1:So they'll do things like in the slower areas. They'll add so maybe you get two full days, or maybe they'll say so it's a 2000 pound a week per diver limit. So maybe they'll say, hey, 2,500 pounds a diver, two full days, or sometimes they'll. I mean, I've even seen it in the short period of time I've been doing it. I've seen it where they'll go like two and a half days and a 2,500 pound, like guys go get them Right. But generally when we're getting to that point where they're adding, it's because it's tough, guys aren't getting, guys weren't getting 2,000. So raising it to 2,500, they still couldn't get it. They couldn't get 2,000.
Speaker 2:So what's a big day for you? 2,000 pounds, 2,000 pounds for you as an individual yeah, so you're picking up 2,000 pounds of sea cucumbers off the ocean floor in a day yeah, that's incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's per diver, and we run two divers on the boat. My dad and I are.
Speaker 2:Your dad sounds like such a legend.
Speaker 1:In his own world. Absolutely, we try not to tell him that His head gets real big.
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Speaker 1:It's kind of common practice after the fishery for the guys to go have a drink at one of the local places, and most of the dive fleet will be in there. And I was having a drink one night and a young diver I was still tending, I wasn't diving yet he walked up to me and he goes are you Scott's son? And I go yeah, and he goes your dad's an absolute legend in this industry. He's literally in books. And I went back and I told my dad that the next morning. And he goes listen, if that ever happens again, you can't tell me that. I can't handle that kind of ego.
Speaker 2:That's funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's a big personality and a lot of fun. He kind of pioneered not the sea cucumber dive industry but the geoduck dive industry in Alaska, him and his group. It was Washington guys that went up and kind of formed the commission. So the shellfish no, not shellfish.
Speaker 2:Let me interrupt you before we get into gooey ducks. Okay, what does a sea cucumber look like? How big are they?
Speaker 1:so I've picked them that look like little gherkins pickles the size of your fingers. Yeah, you don't want those. Yeah, um, there's. There's really not much to process there and I don't know how many would it would take to get 2 000 pounds. I mean when they're so small. We carry net bags there. It's a shrimp netting and the holes are maybe an inch. Yeah, um, they fall through when they're falling through the net.
Speaker 1:Man, you go somewhere else yeah, um, I've also picked them that are 24 inches long and a big around as a football. They have a shell, or they saw. No, they're soft, they're kind of a gelatinous like rubbery feeling and they're full of water. Huh, so the tender actually, so we'll, we'll load bags up on the bottom and send them up, and the tender dumps them into a big um tote with drain holes in it and they take a razor knife and cut a one inch slit in the bottom of every one um before they go into the bags, because you have to drain the water. You can't sell the water weight, right, so everyone gets cut before they go into the totes.
Speaker 2:And are they still alive at that point? Yeah, yeah. And is it the type of thing where they need to be kept alive until they're processed for food? Um, are they flash frozen?
Speaker 1:no, they're, so they're cooked um. But no, as we drain them I'm, I assume they're not yeah you know they're dead once you drain them right um. They don't have a brain, so I don't know how to tell they don't have eyes. You know what I mean. Like you can't like, oh no, heartbeat like it's dead?
Speaker 2:I don't it's. Yeah, it's a weird little animal yeah, it's a weird little animal um, and then what's the market for them?
Speaker 1:mostly asia um, and they're eating them. They're eating them, so they eat the muscle out of them. There's, uh, so if you picture like a football shaped water balloon, it's got weird spikes on the outside of it and they're they vary in color you get kind of blondes and darker ones in our area um, you slice it down the center, open it up. Now you've got it laying flat. There's strips of muscle, you know, maybe as big as your pinky or so, in there, and you kind of just scrape them out with a putty knife. Um, and it's, it's the consistency of clam, like if you've had clam strips, but pretty much flavorless. Um, but it's a, it's an asian delicacy. People really love it. And then they cook the skins and use them for I mean everything from cosmetics to cancer research to, I think, anything that you need like a protein for you know gotcha um, there's a laundry list of stuff that I I mean I sell them at the dock.
Speaker 1:I don't. I don't do any of that right, but uh, I've kind of looked into it a little bit because it's interesting and they pack them and and yeah, so mostly it's a, it's a processed fishery. They're processing and freezing them and packing them and selling them. What's's a geoduck?
Speaker 2:The largest burrowing clam in the world, the largest burrowing clam in the world and they are a bit phallic looking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So actually that's part of the market. So most I'm going to say 80-, 90% of the geoduck market is China and they go into the wet markets that we've all heard so much about in the last few years and they're sold live. So when we dig a geoduck in southeast Alaska, the tender puts a heavy rubber band around every shell and stacks them in we call cages, they're milk crates sacks them in we call cages, they're milk crates. The rubber band puts pressure on the shell like the sand and keeps their stress level down and they get. So when we offload on a Wednesday they are re-boxed, taken to Alaska Air Cargo and they're in China Thursday or Friday and then they go into wet tanks live and are sold live.
Speaker 2:And so a lot of people are using these as some type of virility aphrodisiac.
Speaker 1:I think that's the thought process in it.
Speaker 2:Dude, china is so weird about that stuff. Yeah, you know, there's so many things that get traced back to Chinese medicine for some type of virility enhancement and it's been the cause of the fall of of species around the world. Right, if you look at rhinos or tigers, I mean, the list kind of goes on and on. Actually, uh, the word uh viagra comes from, uh, an indian like continent, subcontinent of india, word for tiger, oh, um, interesting right, I know that.
Speaker 2:so, like the, this whole thing about virility, especially in asia, just keeps getting linked back to animals and whether that's like bear, gallbladders or I mean the list kind of goes on and on. And to do it with an animal that's sustainable, like a geoduck, and it's regulated, that's much better than something that's getting poached someplace else where you have a really fragile population for it. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:You know, and I think that I've eaten them too.
Speaker 2:I didn't notice anything, yeah yeah, same.
Speaker 1:Uh, I think that you see, um, the older generation, I think, had that belief system, yeah, and the younger generation it's the sushi, sushi market, gotcha. So we have a buyer that we work with, that's also. He's been a diver a long time and he's kind of got into doing the middleman piece as well. So he's traveled all over kind of like nurturing these markets and clientele relationships. So he's gone to Vegas, where they're getting in New York City, into these high-end sushi restaurants, to try to build his domestic market for when China's market's soft. To Vegas, where they're getting in New York city into these high end sushi restaurants, um, to try to build his domestic market for when China's market soft and they'll.
Speaker 1:You know, you get two or three slices of gooey duck on a piece of you know eighth inch slices of the neck, you know the next inch and a half, two inches around, and they take it long ways and slice it into little thin slices and put it over a piece of rice and you might get three or four of them to be a hundred bucks. I don't know how many eighth inch slices you can get out of a a geoduck neck, but it's a lot yeah, so how long are they not to get too personal?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah from six inches to the biggest ones I've ever seen, are actually in a photograph of my dad when he was younger, and he's holding them with his arms above his shoulders and the shells are by his knees. So 36 inch necks and those are the biggest ones he's ever seen, and he's, he's uh, I think he's dug over a million pounds it's, it's for sure, not my favorite piece of seafood.
Speaker 2:I I could go the rest of my life without eating them and be kind of stoked yeah it, it's good certain ways.
Speaker 1:You know. I've had it like smoked and canned. It's okay. Clam chowder is great. Grind it up, sure, you know, when I bring it home that's kind of what it gets turned into. Yeah, my dad raves about some pickled geoduck that he had. Yeah, and he's been trying to figure out a recipe. He's been trying to figure out a recipe. We've never got it right, but he had some one time that just, I mean he's still chasing that. That's funny. Yeah, it's clam. You can make clam strips out of it.
Speaker 1:We've made fritters, I mean. But in the end so in the beginning of the fishery, when my dad started doing it in Washington, it was all a processed fishery, so it didn't matter if the shells got broken when you were digging them. You weren't rubber banding them because they were all going and getting ground up and that's what was going in your mccormick or nally's or whatever clam chowder that you buy in the can campbell's clam chowder or whatever you know. Yeah, um, now it's transitioned into this, the live market, because the value is so much higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah, huh, okay, so you're, you're doing all this crazy diving for stuff. In alaska it's uncommon for people to work in a commercial harvest fishery as well as a recreational um fisher. Uh, so you kind of live in, live in both worlds there. My understanding is that you guide out here on the coast. Right now we are um on auto rock devil's punch bowl just outside Newport Oregon. Absolutely beautiful spot. Had a hell of an adventure yesterday. We're going to get into that. But uh, you guide out here for halibut, coho salmon, crab, albacore, tuna, rockfish. Yeah, you guide on the columbia for walleye salmon. Uh, sturgeon, sturgeon, yeah steelhead.
Speaker 1:You know, unfortunately we really don't have any anymore in the columbia yeah, I mean they're there Pretty thin, but the season's so small and you can't base a livelihood off. If we might get a couple days to do it.
Speaker 2:I quit guiding steelhead quite a while ago now and the last year that I did it I was guiding on the grand ronde and it based on the creel surveys, it was 157 hours per fish, 157 angler hours per fish. So then you know, a client rolls in and they book a eight-hour trip. Yeah, it's like man, uh you, you got to know, going into this, that the odds of you hooking a fish, seeing a fish, are very low.
Speaker 2:The odds of us landing a fish are extremely low and it felt pretty dishonest for me to take people's money to offer that experience, and I know the goal isn't always to get a fish in your hand, right. Yeah, and it's a beautiful thing to stand in a river with fall colors and wave a spay rod around and do all that. That's great. But I also could see at the end of the day, when they hadn't touched a fish and they'd worked really hard, that there was some disappointment there and I didn't feel good about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I, I understand that and yeah, I see the same thing. You know, I, I want to be successful and and we had a pretty decent wintertime fishery in the Columbia, um, close to where I live, you know, in in Hermiston area, and and we would have, we'd have some good days. I mean, it wasn't it wasn't uncommon to have double digit days, um, but that seems like it's kind of a thing of the past. Yeah, and it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, you know, unfortunately it's, it's it's changed um, and it's not any one thing right.
Speaker 2:People like to blame the one thing that they're mad about, but it takes a lot of things. Yeah, what am I missing? What else do you guide for? You know, I think you pretty much covered it. I've been salmon fishing with you and I've been tuna fishing with you. When we salmon fished here a couple of years ago, we had a banger day. We caught limits of fish in short order. There's whales all around us. It was a big ocean that day, but you handled your boat with experience and, yeah, it was good. I felt confident and comfortable out there with you, even though the ocean was big, which gave me the confidence to do what we did yesterday. So the albacore tuna fishery in oregon is not that old people have not been fishing for albacore out here forever, um, no relatively new fishery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's. There's guys on the dock, you know they're. They're older guys in their 50s and 60s but on the same dock my boats moored on that were, you know, the first handful of guys to do it in the sport fishery. Yeah, um, I know them. Um, I think maybe you would you had gone up to the fish cleaning station, but one of them came down and talked to us yesterday and was fascinated by, uh, what we did and he was yeah, I mean, I know two guys off that dock that were, you know, probably one of the first 20 to be doing it on you know themselves yeah, um, so I mean that that shows it right there, like the, the first people to to fish for albacore here in oregon are still alive and still fishing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're still hanging out with them, fishing with them. Yeah, so brand new fishery and we'll get into the albacore a little bit as as a species. So these are juvenile albacore, yeah, and they sort of make a lap around the pacific ocean yeah, that's my understanding.
Speaker 1:You know they. They spawn and are born in the japan region and I mean, based on kind of what I know from you know, my internet research really is they. They kind of make a. They drop south and cut across the pacific and then um kind of up the baja california coastline. I think I don't think there's much of an albacore fishery down there that I know of. I think that they're kind of offshore still when they're in that region. Okay, and up here where we're at, they're following that green water, blue water break because there's good feed in the green and they live in the blue.
Speaker 2:So what is green water? What is blue water?
Speaker 1:So it's just your chlorophyll break line. Okay, you know, the green water is kind of like the way I view it and there's probably a scientist that could explain this far better but the way I view it is kind of your green water is like that Alaska stream line that you know current line that comes down from the north that's full of the bait fish and that's where your salmon live. And you know current line that comes down from the north that's full of the bait fish and that's where your salmon live and you know spend their lives. And it kind of comes down from the north and the blue water current kind of swirls in the you know the south pacific, the equator makes a big swirl. You know the same path as the albacore, essentially south from japan down across, you know, by the equator, comes up the Oregon-Washington coastline and then cuts back across towards Japan. And that's kind of the cycle that the albacore do as well is that they kind of follow that vortex, I guess.
Speaker 2:And when you get into the blue water, it's visibly blue, it's stark, it's this deep vermilion blue. That's very clear. Um, it's, it's, it's visibly distinct. And then the green water is much the same. So as we're trolling in and out of those different zones, I noticed when I was reeling fish in I you know, I'm sorting the line back and forth on on the reel with my thumb so it doesn't stack up on one side and I would notice green stripes coming off the line that were, you know, staining the back of my hand and my shirt sleeve from that chlorophyll yeah, yeah, amazing, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's interesting how?
Speaker 2:what's the average size of albacore here? 15 to 20, 15, 20 pounds, yeah, and two days ago you caught one of the biggest albacore that's ever been caught here yeah, I, I mean, I don't want to like uh as far as recreationally I mean, I'll brag for you.
Speaker 1:I'm sure there's been, I'm sure there's been bigger fish caught, but yeah, we, we landed a 36 on the scale, um, and it wasn't a. You know. You hear, oh, we landed a 40 pounder, we landed a 30 pounder and you look at it you're like, yeah, man, that that fish is 22. Yeah, they always look bigger than sure. And, and fishermen lie, that's, that's a thing, you know.
Speaker 2:We exaggerate fish size yeah this fish was I actually.
Speaker 1:They put it on the scale. The clients did um and just a spring scale on my boat, not a certified scale okay, so on on a certified, on a not certified scale, but we're just ballparking it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 36 pound fish, it's a great big albacore yeah.
Speaker 1:So we, we caught it on a hand line and and, uh, generally I just have the clients take a wrap and swing those fish into the boat, I don't gaff them, and we actually it was a little bit chaotic I had three clients, um, one wheelchair bound, so he's, he's just in the seat running a rod and we're tripled.
Speaker 1:We got both hand lines on and a rod on. So now I've got to clear the other lines by myself, the other five lines, yeah, and keep the boat straight and kind of talk everybody through and gaff fish, and we kind of get set up in a position where we're okay, and I've got the gaff and I'm going to help the, the guy with the rod and, uh, and get his fish in. And out of the corner of my eye I saw the handline fish kind of coming up past the boat as he's bringing him in. It's swimming past the boat and I I probably did the wrong thing as a guide and I went, oh, don't lose that fish. Uh, you know the last thing you want to. You want to get excited once the fish is on the boat. Right, get your clients all worked up, and then yeah they panic.
Speaker 1:But uh, yeah, we brought it up and, uh, put the gaff in it and I immediately said that's the biggest one I've ever seen in person. Yeah, and get it on the floor, get that. We landed all three fish, everything's great. I start immediately because when you're in them, you're in them. So I start bringing the boat back up to speed, getting gear back out, and they go hey, we want to, we want to weigh that one, we want to weigh that one.
Speaker 1:So they, they hung it on the scale and the one guy's holding the scale with both hands with the fish hanging on it and the other guy's trying to read the scale and he goes it's 36. And I go no way, you gotta, you gotta look at that again. Yeah, yeah, no, it's like what are we? Are we using the, the us side of the scale? Like what do we? Got going on here and, yeah, 36 pounds. Um, wow, I put it. You know, I have a, a brute trash can on the back of the boat that we on the, on the platform that we use for a bleed bucket, and you know, your, your average tuna, the tail sticks out two, three, four inches. This one stuck out like 18. Yeah, um, it was an impressive fish. Yeah, yeah, good job.
Speaker 2:So you called me about a month ago and said hey, man, you want to go spearfishing for albacore and I tried to come out just a rod and reel fish albacore last year. But hurricane hillary came up and, yeah, firked up the end of the season for everybody. I was like, absolutely yeah. And then I'm like, what did I just sign up for? So I started doing a little bit of research and the research is coming up dry. If you go to youtube and type in spearfishing for albacore, you come up with nothing. Yeah, right, uh. Then you have to start digging into forums, which is an unholy hell that nobody should ever have to subject themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and you find little references and rumors here and there. Uh, I start calling around to different divers and they're like yeah, I mean I suppose you could, I don't know anybody who has. And the more digging we did, we basically were able to come up with four documented instances where people had spearfish for albacore tuna successfully in oregon yeah I was like, okay, nobody knows.
Speaker 2:Nobody knows how to do it, we're pioneering like this has barely ever been done. Yeah, something new. Yeah, I talked to dan semrad from oregon free dive company, um, an instructor who's a world-class uh, world-class spear fisherman and diver and he said, yeah, we went out and we got two. We would have lost one of them if we didn't have a bungee, because it wasn't a good shot. He was pulling hard on the float and we were able to, you know, secure that fish with the second shot because we had a bungee. So you should get a bungee and do your best. Okay, that's pretty limited advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I talked to Danny Bolton about it and all of his different tuna experiences and he gave me some advice on how we should go about this. And then we started with just going out there and finding the fish. We had a three-and-a-half-hour run to get out there. Yeah, the bar crossing was big. One of the boats we talked to yesterday had had to go up to the bar, turn around and come back 45 minutes later because you know they were taking two big waves over the bow. So we make it all the way out there successfully Big run out to that blue water line. Not long after we decided to start fishing, we started catching fish. Yeah, which is a classic Pathfinder sport fishing experience. For me, it's like lines on the water fish in the boat. It just happens like that. We try to stay dialed in. Yeah, yeah. So we got some fish in the boat. Everybody got to reel fish in.
Speaker 1:Poor Jesse was not feeling super great. You know, I actually really appreciated that he was chumming for us. It probably saved some money in bait.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe a little bit yeah.
Speaker 1:Whatever he had for breakfast. You know, I'm sure the albacore were fine with it too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh and and, to be honest, I was a little bit woozy and and and beat up just from the trip out there. But we, we got into all of our dive gear, which was pretty comical as the boat was tossing around out there. Yeah, I fell down half a dozen times just trying to get my wetsuit on, get belted up, and now we've got to go try and find some fish again. So we're all in our wetsuits. In the boat we hooked up a couple more fish. So I'm like in my wetsuit, just, you know, sweating it out, reeling fish in, and we decided that we were in an area that had some fish. We could see them on the surface. Occasionally there are some birds around. I was like, all right, we just got to get in, get our faces in the water and and start looking for fish. Yeah, you guys started chum, drop a flasher, lay there for hours on end and wait for fish to show up and then try and calmly take a drop on them and get them killed. We're in the water for about an hour.
Speaker 2:I got some pretty significant vertigo. So for folks, I want you to try to imagine this I'm laying in the water and the stuff that you can see in the water, which isn't much. It's like little sparkly stuff, the occasional jellyfish's. It's moving with you, right? So it appears to not be moving at all because you're all subjected to the same forces in the water. However, there was like a six foot swell, so my, my body is getting pumped up and down, side to side, like I'm moving a lot, yeah, um, every few seconds, but my eyes are telling me that I'm not moving. My ears are telling me that I'm moving very much, and that's typically the recipe for getting pretty darn sick. Yeah, that's, that's how seasickness happens pretty much yep.
Speaker 2:So your, your brain, is saying, hey, I think we got poisoned, let's go ahead and get rid of everything that's in our body right now. Um, I didn't throw up, but I could definitely feel that coming. You know, I was trying to swim over to where we saw some fish and I was like man, this, this, this is not going well. But as we came back to the boat where you guys were chumming, casey goes there's tuna right here and he tried to take a surface shot, missed one. They boogied but it's like okay, you know, we, we fired a shot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like yeah, it almost felt like at that point we were, we were semi-successful, totally. I want to back up just a little bit. Uh, so I do a buddy trip every year with some of my good friends yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Casey got the invite this year. Yeah, and I just said tongue in cheek yeah, why don't we just troll them up and then put you in the water and let you shoot one, cause I know he's a pretty accomplished spear fisherman. Yeah, I've never done it with him, um, but I've heard his stories. I know he does it a lot. I know he. His reaction sort of shocked me. He kind of like got this stone. Look on his face. He's like you would let me do that. And I'm like, well, yeah, sure he goes. That's been a dream for 13 years. He goes. I just never could get the ride out. He goes. I tried to put it together. Um, we actually booked a guide 13 years ago and coast and tried to figure it out yeah, and and also to be clear, this wasn't a guided trip.
Speaker 1:No it was not. I don't guide spearfishing trips. This was, this was buddies trying something different?
Speaker 2:yeah, and you know it, we're we're trying to pioneer something here, yeah. So yeah, casey had had this goal for a long time and it just wasn't getting done. People aren't. It's just not a thing here yet.
Speaker 1:And I didn't know any of that leading into it, I just kind of said it tongue-in-cheek like yeah let's throw you in the water, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then when he's like, you know, then kind of the wheels got in motion and I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, if buddy trip, we can go out as friends and yeah let you get in.
Speaker 1:And then I started thinking about it. I'm like, well, james has been getting into spearfishing big time, like I know who to invite. Yeah, so that's that's when I reached out to you. And still then I didn't know that we were like the fifth group to ever do it successfully, right, I didn't know that. I mean, I just assumed it was something people did. You know, I'm not tapped into the spearfishing world by any. I've never done it, I've never freedove, and what I'm doing is far different, you know, in the diving world, Well, I'm going to skip a couple steps here in the storytelling, because this is a new thing.
Speaker 2:I do think that we got it figured out, because we successfully killed knob corotuna with the spear gun while diving uh folks. I'm not going to tell you how we did it, but that's fair.
Speaker 1:That's fair.
Speaker 2:I like that but we got it done, yeah, and I think the next time, if we employ the same tactics that we did this time, we can throw three divers in the water and we can be. We can be stringing fish.
Speaker 1:I, I agree with that. I think that we learned a lot yesterday. Um, I started to tell you at breakfast, you know this, this albacore thing, I still feel like I have a lot to learn and I, I mean I do okay with it, but it's like it is a new fishery, everyone's still learning. Yeah, I mean, if you're good at it, you're still learning. You never should stop learning and it's to me it's the biggest challenge. Um, I was thinking about this on the ride in. You know the. You're kind of quiet on the ride home and we got music playing and as we're getting to where we can see shore and I can see the bridge and I can see the lighthouse, coming into newport, I have the thought that every and I have kind of the same thought every time I'm in that situation, coming home from a tuna trip, that this is the adventure of a lifetime. Yeah, and I get to do it again tomorrow it.
Speaker 2:It also has a feeling for me of wow, we, we actually survived, that we did something big, because you know, in all fairness and this isn't I don't want this to come across as like a lack of confidence in you, because if I wasn't confident in you and your boat, I wouldn't go yeah, but I went into this very much knowing like this is super dangerous. This could be the last thing I do yeah, right, yeah yeah, and we were covered up in sharks a couple times.
Speaker 2:You know I I got stung in the lips by jellyfish so many times my lips are still numb. Yeah, um there, you've got a bunch of float lines in the water. You've you've got fish that you don't know about. It's blue water. Anything can happen, anything can show up in blue water. You could have a freaking great white shark, you could have a blue marlin, like anything can show up there. And uh, yeah, but long story short, casey husk. Uh, you know, a civil servant, a fine human firefighter, just a big, hairy american winning machine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's the best way to describe Casey, I think.
Speaker 2:Dude, he freaking got it done and he strummed an Albacore tuna with a spear gun on a dive and we boated that thing and then it was nothing but smiles and high fives and everybody was kind of beat up and exhausted and we're like all right, now we're going to get back to trolling and we're going to put some weight in the boat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everyone was tired at that point. I on and we're going to put some weight in the boat. Yeah, yeah, everyone was tired at that point. I mean, you know what One thing you mentioned it was rough going out and we were probably an extra 45 minutes or an hour and the bar was rough and we started 45 or 45 minutes or an hour later than I would normally start a tuna trip. So I think we met at five 30 and had like eight wheelbarrows full of gear to go to the boat and ice um, I normally have my clients meet me at the boat at 5 am.
Speaker 1:Right and the boat's idling, I stuff ready to go. Yeah, I did that because of the bar. We were at a a negative tide and we were going to be crossing at max ebb and I knew it was going to be tough. Um, sounds like from the reports it was tougher an hour, but I didn't.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to do it in the dark, I knew that and max ebb means that the tide is running out as fast as it's going to be running out.
Speaker 1:So, like buoy number seven, the green can just just pass the bridge. If you're headed out, had current rip lines behind it. I mean it looked like a river, you know, and that's hitting a westerly swell, and when they meet, it's like if you take the tips of your fingers and push on them. They push up, yeah, and they stack, and yeah, I mean, it was that way yesterday.
Speaker 2:A westerly swell from the biggest ocean in the world. Yeah, that too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So I mean I knew I also know how to handle that. I mean, you take it slow, You've got. You take it slow. You got to know what your skill level and ability level is. And I knew that I had a pretty hardy crew and if we took one over the bow and everyone got a little water down the back of their neck, they were going to be okay, yeah, we're all ready for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah, so we left a little late. So, that being said, we got to the blue water late, I mean two hours later, because of the kind of combined we had a. At one point we were running 23, 24 miles an hour, which is pretty dang good going out, and 10 minutes later we were doing 12. Yeah, Just kind of trudging along, getting beat up a little, and it improved as the day went on.
Speaker 1:But I kind of say all that to say that at one point I looked down and you guys were on your first dive and I looked down and it's noon and generally when I'm guiding tuna trips, I mean kind of 130 is when we're pulling lines, you know, and at that point I mean we trolled up a few fish, but that's not what we came to do, right, I think we had like four or five fish in the boat yeah, and, and, and that's great and all, but what in my mind, this trip was? First, beer fishing. Yeah, and I knew we're gonna try and do something big.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're gonna try and do something big. Yeah, we're going to try and do something big. And I even you know I make appointments with the gals that fillet our fish. I let them know what my plan is for the next day, where we're going to be, what time. And the day before I brought in 31 tuna and we had a real good day. You know, 31 for three guys. We had tired arms of the day or they did. Yeah, my arms were fine, uh, uh. But yeah, we, we get to the end of the day and I told her I go, hey, we're doing. She goes, you're doing tuna tomorrow, right, and I go, yeah, but I don't expect these kind of numbers. We're kind of doing something special. Um, we're gonna be doing something different, um, so, but when we, when we got out there and it was noon and we were one dive down, I think you guys got out of the water at like 1230.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we had one shot that missed and I'm thinking, boy, like where'd the time go? You know what I mean. Normally I've got a whole day of fishing in at this point and we haven't, and it was just kind of you know the combination of factors, but I purposely didn't schedule a trip today, knowing that we could.
Speaker 2:We could spend some time, yeah, you know well, after that, we, we tried a couple different things. We made some tweaks and adjustments, figured it out, got it done, and then it was awesome. Then we went back to trolling and we, we ended up with 18 really nice fish, yeah, yeah. And we've got a pile of fillets and I'm going to be headed home and doing some pressure canning, yeah, and putting up a winner's worth of tuna, yeah, awesome.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I'm just so grateful for that food and for the experience. Absolutely incredible. Man, what's next for you and your season? So we?
Speaker 1:got another week, week and a half of this, yeah, um, and then we're doing the columbia river gorge. Um, kings, okay, king salmon, yep, yep, and uh, we'll kind of do that through september, and then it's, then it's time for me to go north and, uh, getting that cold water, yeah, yeah, go pick up, go pick up some sea slugs, sea slugs, yeah, slimy sea slugs 2,000 pounds a day.
Speaker 2:Nice. Well, that'll be good times. Yeah, I hope that I get to meet your dad and sit down and hear some of his stories, because it sounds like he's had wild adventures on the high seas all over.
Speaker 1:I like to add in a few of the sayings that he kind of gives us regularly, but man, he's full of weird little monikers. Casey made the statement yesterday as we were out there that there's always a cost, and he wasn't talking about the expense he's talking about. This is hard. What you guys did yesterday, what we did as a group, is a hard thing. It's a big adventure and you're always sacrificing something, whether it's, I mean, all the way down to like time at home. You know on and on right.
Speaker 1:And one thing my dad says on the boat when we're working is you know, there's always something wrong, whether it's your home life, because you're gone for two months, or it's your mechanical, your suit's not quite right. We wear merino and fleece under our dry suits and maybe that wadded up. I mean something as simple as that. There's always something wrong. But you just got to put it out of your mind and go to work, yeah. And that's kind of the hard-nosed commercial fishing way of looking at Casey's comment yesterday on a sport dive. Yeah, there's always something wrong. You just got to kind of clear your mind. If you're going to get in the water, yeah, Because you better be.
Speaker 2:Just figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and anytime you're in the water you have to kind of have your stuff together. You need to be all present, Because if you're not, if you're in the water and you're worried about something else that's unrelated, things can go wrong and any problem you could ever have is magnified probably by a hundred if you're on the bottom of the ocean, you know.
Speaker 2:You know, we talked about a story at breakfast that I'm going to cover in detail in a future show, where some folks had had got on a boat with, uh, an illegal outfitter who had a pinchy boat that wasn't seaworthy. They got out there Um, bilge pumps were. Pumps weren't working. The boat sank. And it wasn't far from here, right yeah, and they were doing the same thing. They were tuna fishing. The boat sank, they didn't have a working radio, nobody knew where they were and nobody even knew that this boat was out. It was 18 hours before they were rescued and most of the party had died in the water.
Speaker 2:So you want to go with a good outfitter. You don't necessarily want to go with the least expensive outfitter. Yeah, I agree with that hitter. Yeah, I agree with that. And you know, you, you want to like, don't just be committed to the trip either, like when you walk down that dock and look at the boat, that boat should be tidy, it should be clean, it should be organized, with the gear squared away. The captain should talk to you about what the trip is going to be about, what, what the safety plan is about, where the safety equipment is, and you should have confidence that they know what they're doing and they're doing it with equipment that is going to stand up to the job.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Another thing that I very much appreciate you, which is why I'm willing to go into a risky situation with you to do it. Yeah, and all of those risk factors are mitigated by your skill and experience and your equipment. Yeah, yeah, yeah you.
Speaker 1:You know, a saying that I've kind of developed, as long as we're talking about sayings, is uh, not all boat owners are boat captains facts yeah, it's. Uh, boat owners are boat captains facts yeah, it's a it, the guys that you know, and we see it a lot in the river, I think. I mean, I'm a maybe a beneficiary of it, but I think oregon's entry level barrier to entry into the guide industry is too low. Yeah, um, you do have to have a coast guard captain's license, but even that, now there's online schools that you can get that through, and I'm not a person that can learn online. I can go online and I can pass the tests, but at the end of the day, if you start asking me questions, I don't. I didn't learn anything right.
Speaker 2:I learned how to pass the test sure, and while somebody's taking that test, they can have their phone out looking up the answers to every question.
Speaker 1:Exactly so it's I I mean, I probably would get a lot of crap for saying this, but I think that, yeah, I think even not all guides are up to what they the standard they should be?
Speaker 2:um, there's no skill requirement to be a hunting guide in oregon, yeah, and I I think that that's. That's a shame and it's common in the lower 48 for that to be the case. Um, in fact, the only lower 48 state that I can think of that has a skill requirement for guides is maine, and it's tough, really it's tough, to be a guide in maine. So if somebody has a maine guide license, they, they have skills that have actually been tested and developed and it's a real accomplishment. Yeah, whereas if you're a guide in Oregon, idaho, wyoming, pick your state, you I'm not saying that they're not great guides, because there's tremendous guides all over this country.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But just because your guide doesn't mean you're a good guide, yeah yeah, and I want to make it clear that I know a lot of really really great fishing guides. A lot of guys are, I mean, far more experienced than I am. It's just that you want to maybe vet your guys. Yeah, you know what we're doing and the level the group of guys that are kind of doing these bigger trips like we're doing, is smaller. But you really want to make sure you're going with somebody that's like you said, got their gear dialed in, knows how to read weather, knows how to read, I mean, what the tide's going to be doing, what the bar's going to look like in the morning, everything, yeah, you know, and that's that's important.
Speaker 1:You know, I, I, I have a lot of fun with this, but I take it super seriously. I mean, I'm taking I I limit my tuna trips to four people, but I'm taking four people 50 miles off the oregon coast and no matter how long I spend looking at satellite shots and weather reports and the NOAA website, sometimes they're all wrong. I mean, what's the old joke about the weatherman? It's the only person that can be wrong 80% of the time and still keep their job. Sometimes things change while you're out. You're a long ways out. We're three hours from shore. Our boat riding was a little better. I think we were an hour and 20 minutes from shore on the way in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were scooting on the way back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was great. But you know, and these trips are tough and you know I cancel or postpone a lot of trips, reschedule a lot of trips because of weather down here in the summers, which is just the nature of the beast it is. But clients get upset sometimes. You know they're here, maybe they're only here for one week they're. You know they're on a family vacation, whatever it might be. And I have to explain to people listen, this is how I pay my mortgage and feed my kids. Like I, I want to go more than anybody. You know what I mean and I love it right beyond the, the financial aspect of it. Like it's my job, it's also my passion. Like I want to go more than you do. I guarantee it right. But uh, if I'm saying we can't go, it's it's because I want to make sure you guys come home, you know, or at least are comfortable, you know, and have a good experience yeah um, you know, I've laid it out for people sometimes that like, hey, there's a difference between uncomfortable and unsafe.
Speaker 1:We're gonna be uncomfortable and if you guys are okay with that, well, we can do some near shore stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, I'm not, I'm not going 50 miles uncomfortable yeah but if we're gonna rock fish, you know, by the jetties or something like, hey, we can go do it if you guys will be totally safe, but it won't be comfortable and if you guys understand that, you're good with it, I'm be comfortable and if you guys understand that and you're good with it, I'm good to go. But I need you to know, going into it, what we're looking at. And, yeah, it's just like I said, people I think some people think that you're, I don't know, messing with them. It's the weirdest response in my mind because I live in this world, right, and they'll send me like what do you mean? The weather's going to be bad. It says it's going to be sunny. It's like, well, yeah, I don't care if it rains. You know what I mean. Like, put your rain jacket on. That's not what I'm looking at, you know. So, yeah, I always feel bad in this weird pressure when I have to cancel trips or reschedule trips with clients.
Speaker 2:That's normal man. I feel all that same stuff too with clients. But that's normal man. I feel all that same stuff too. Yeah, and it feels terrible to to tell somebody that you know is excited about going.
Speaker 1:We can't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and it's like an ego check and and it's it's really hard, but it's also the right decision. Yeah, and folks, if, if you trust your guide well enough to be willing to go with them, you need to trust them when they say that it's not safe to go yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely yeah, okay. So if somebody wants to uh not for spearfishing, uh, but for rod and reel fishing if somebody wants to book a trip for rockfish, halibut, crab salmon, um, walleye, sturgeon, albacore, tuna, how do they do it?
Speaker 1:so um all the social medias. Pathfinder sport fishing, um pathfinder sport fishingcom and my cell number is 541-274-9387. Shoot me a text, give me a call. Nice um phone numbers on the website. Emails on the website. Phone numbers on the side of the boat.
Speaker 2:Phone numbers on the side of the boat so I don't mind giving it out here either um yeah, get a hold of me, I'd love to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, you know, let's. Let's plan something, figure something out and cool.
Speaker 2:Um, and you and I need to plan the next adventure too, man always, man, always an adventure when we get together and I feel like we, we, we just cracked the seal on this thing.
Speaker 1:I think so too. I think we need to do this again, now that we have, now that we know, the program yeah, I'm gonna gear up differently.
Speaker 2:Uh, I know what to expect. I'm gonna take some different drugs before so that I can deal with this vertigo issue a little bit better. And, honestly, I just need to spend some more time blue water spearfishing because it's the biggest gap in my experience right now. So I think if I just put the hours in bobbing around out there, I'm going to harden my brain up to it and get better at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the best way to quit being seasick is to be seasick yeah yeah and uh.
Speaker 2:You know, the worst thing about it is that you're gonna survive yeah, that's my favorite saying.
Speaker 1:Clients love that right about the time they're wiping the puke off their lips, I go. You know what the worst part about being seasick is?
Speaker 2:you don't want to, but you're gonna. Yeah, yeah, all right, brother. Well, I appreciate you so much. Um, and also, I just got to give another shout out to casey on a tremendous, tremendous achievement of uh, getting an albacore tuna with a spear gun, and to thank him for opening up his home for me and greg to stay, to stay here, and to you for making this trip possible. Thank all of you so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anytime, man, we're happy to do it. I don't want to speak for Casey, but I think we all had a pretty good time. This was nothing short of epic. Epic, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks brother, you're good, thank you. Bye everybody. I Thank you, bye everybody. I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages. Your support is incredible, and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting. I think that that's fantastic. I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can. Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander. Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch Podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media. Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show, and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.