WILD BLOG: Salmonville, U.S.A.'s rapidly growing suburb: Tuna Town!
UPDATED June 19, 2010 / 9:40 p.m.

GARIBALDI, Ore. - If you’re looking for the surest sign that albacore tuna madness has gained an immovable foothold in the middle of Salmonville, U.S.A., look no further than the 11 300-gallon, white polyethylene tanks that went into the water in Garibaldi in late June.

Those tanks will soon be brimming with tuna snacks.

Live bait has made it to Little Italy, just in time for the 2010 albacore season.

Westport and Ilwaco tuna charters will react with a “ho-hum” – they’ve been fishing livies for years – but the availability of live anchovies for the general North Coast fishing public (in a port that’s arguably the capitol of the PNW tuna fleet) is just another hint that things aren’t like they used to be in the Pacific Northwest saltwater world.

Salmonville might still be the biggest, most populous fishing city in the region, but it has an explosively growing new suburb: Tuna Town.

“It’s like a snowball rolling downhill,” says Del “Tuna Dog” Stephens, director of the Oregon Tuna Classic and one of the perpetrators of the North Coast tuna explosion. “You go onto the chat boards and look under ‘saltwater’, and tuna is all anybody wants to talk about. Tuna is it. There continues to be an incredible amount of people getting into the fishery every day, every week, every season. Heading into 2010, that snowball is just going faster and faster.”

Opportunity-driven growth
The sport fleet’s tuna refitting is noticeably more pronounced in Garibaldi, Newport, Winchester Bay and Charleston than in Washington’s tuna ports, largely because anglers running out of Ilwaco, Westport and La Push have had sustained offshore Chinook and coho fisheries to carry them through the summertime albacore peak.

Not that the Evergreen State has avoided the five-year tuna spike – Outdoor Emporium in Seattle, for example, just added a new 32-foot run of tuna-gear shelf space to its tackle department – but the average Beaver State saltwater angler has had to adjust out of necessity.

“Five or six years ago, you had a few salmon fishermen looking for something else to do because of low salmon runs and limited seasons, and that really got the ball rolling,” Stephens says. “They’d get out there with some of their salmon gear, get a taste of it, and by the following year they were back in the shops looking for more tuna gear.”

The Oregon coast will see a slight expansion in salmon-driven opportunities this summer thanks to a Chinook season and late-June selective coho opener south of Cape Falcon, but with a small coho quota and scratchy fishing through the first few weeks of the king season, the focus from Bandon to Garibaldi will likely be on albacore again from July to September.

“When coho season opens, those fish will be 4, maybe 5 pounds,” Stephens observes. “People will catch a bunch of fish pretty quickly, and with a 26,000-fish quota, we’ll blow through it so fast the season will be over almost before it started. People will be looking for something else to do. That’s about the time the tuna will show up.”

The birth/growth of a tuna addict
The typical salmon-come-tuna evolution typically runs the following course: you’ll fish a season (maybe two) using your heaviest salmon and halibut sticks as trolling rods, probably spending the money to outfit them with tuna-capable reels. You’ll be satisfied with the results until about August, when the schools break up and the trolling bite peters out.

And then you’ll get tuna envy. The run-and-gun swimbait throwers and iron-burners will continue to pummel the fish while you spend $150 in gas for two trolling bites. You’ll either give up the tuna hunt for the year, or, more likely, you’ll check the balance on your gold card and go in search of honest-to-God tuna tackle.

“Guys will learn how to troll with their halibut rods, but then later in the season when fish aren’t hitting on the troll, they’ll have to learn how to vertical jig or run-and-gun with swimbaits,” Stephens. “They’ll start to show up at seminars asking ‘Hey, about this vertical-jigging thing …’. They figure out pretty quickly that they need to invest some money in their gear to do it right, because they’ve now experienced the addiction and need to catch fish later in the season. I see this all … the … time.”

Getting geared up
Make no mistake: The Pacific Northwest tackle market is still heavily, heavily driven by the salmon and steelhead fisheries. Consequently, most retailers stock their shelves accordingly, and tuna clones are a lot harder to find than Corkies and Coyote spoons. The tackle refit usually includes a run through local purveyors like Fisherman’s Marine, Cabela’s, Sportco and Auburn Sports & Marine, and some additional surfing through Charkbait.com, Angler’sCenter.com, BlueOceanTackle.com or FinestKind.com.

Retailers are increasingly cognizant of the tuna fishery, though, and so are national factories that have historically dedicated 100 % of their albacore energies to California.

“Tackle companies are getting more aggressive about serving this market,” Stephens says. “More and more of them are starting to address the fact that the Northwest albacore fishery has become a very viable market for them. The interest is coming from several different directions: Fishermen are asking for more tuna gear, and tackle companies are starting to understand that this market is here to stay. You’re going to see a lot more tuna gear marketed in the Northwest in the immediate future.”

"The boats are getting bigger"
Wooldridge, Duckworth, Fish Rite, Boulton and Hewes Craft have all built bigger, wider, beefier boats in recent months, and while not engineered exclusively for tuna, their expanded standard fuel capacities, deck space, fish-storage space, etc. make them much more applicable for albacore.  

“The customers we’re catering to are addressing albacore as part of their use, for sure,” says Mike Boulton of Boulton Boats. “Our biggest focus right now is the 26 x 8-footer, which allows for a fair amount of diversity. Even the 22-footers we’ve built are going in that direction, where they’ll be used for salmon, but can also be used in the tuna fisheries where the fish come closer to shore.”

Stephens sees it firsthand during the OTC’s summerlong run through Newport, Charleston, Coos Bay and Garibaldi: “There’s a lot of 24- and 26-foot boats coming into this arena where previously it was a lot of 21-footers or aluminum boat that couldn’t carry enough fuel,” he says. “People might not all be going to 28- and 30-footers, but they’re spending the money to step up into bigger, more powerful boats with more range.”

-JS

"Salmonville to Tuna Town" originally appears in the July issue of Northwest Sportsman magazine. Go check out the Editor's Blog and take advantage of a smokin' subscription premium going on now

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