“It was a zoo out there,” Capt. John McMurray tells me on the phone the night before our scheduled outing. “Let’s make it 0100 on the dock.”

When a skipper changes a departure time despite feeling every wave in his joints from a nine-day run of offshore charters, you know you’ve got the right guy at the wheel. That extra hour’s advantage can mean the difference between victory and defeat, especially when jockeying against the rest of the fleet. “These aren’t human hours,” he likes to say. Part of what distinguishes a successful tuna fiend is finding one whose rhythm beats in tune with the fish.

“I feel like dog shit,” he says as he makes his way to the helm after getting the boat dialed in. It’s 2 a.m. He turns over the ignition for the tenth day in a row to fire up the triple 300-hp Yamahas that power his 36-foot Contender. The tuna angler is defined by a constant battle of weariness and drive, and for McMurray, the latter wins again as he gets ready to throw lines and head back to the continental shelf.

Capt. John McMurray is about as dialed-in to the tuna bite off of Long Island, New York, as a charter captain can be.

Backing out of his slip in Oceanside, New York, McMurray eyes a pod of peanut bunker in the channel, flitting about the surface in the soft, ambient light from a small bridge overpass. In a flash, a cast net deploys and returns over the rail, billowing with life. Peanut-bunker scales sequin the deck as most of the fingerlings give up the ghost in the short queue for the live well. No matter, McMurray assures me as I scramble to collect the strays. Dead or alive, tuna won’t turn their noses up at a chum slick.

Bean-bag chairs are pulled down from the T-top and strewn about the deck for our two-hour haul to the tuna grounds. After clearing the inlet, the throttles open, and we’re making 45 knots. “Let me know if you get wet,” the captain says. “Doesn’t mean I give a shit, but …” The captain’s voice trails off, and he turns away to conceal a coy, corner-of-the-mouth smile.

Categorically, I steer clear of fishing charters. Apart from the already-prohibitive costs for a lowly scribe scratching out his humble keep, I file most charter captains with football coaches, fire-and-brimstone-promulgating preachers and military drill sergeants. I’ll come home with nothing but a cold and take my lashings from Mother Nature to kingdom come, but damned if I’ll pay to be some egomaniac’s whipping post for a “nice day on the water.” But then there are captains like John McMurray. I might do all right slumming it on my own inshore striper and fluke endeavors, but an offshore sled and a quiver of the latest and greatest bluewater rods and reels just isn’t in my cards, so when it comes to chasing tuna, the charter captains get the best of me. I’ll suck it up for a day.

You wouldn’t guess it by his offshore prowess, but McMurray, who is 51, did not start life anywhere near the tuna grounds, and in some ways, it shows. He’s not abashed about his Alexandria, Virginia, upbringing and is quick to dub himself a “Capitol Hill kid.” He is a veritable diamond in the rough: generally soft-spoken, and a man of letters who majored in political science at Loyola College in Maryland.

Catching yellowfin tuna on spinning rods is one of McMurray’s specialties. 

He came to tuna fishing slowly, cutting his teeth on Potomac catfish. He got his first real taste of saltwater fishing when he was in his 20s. Before joining the Coast Guard, he drove south on a Honda Shadow motorcycle, wrecking it in Florida where he landed a lifeguard gig and jumped a few tarpon. The following spring, he spent five grand building out a collection of 12- and 14-weight fly-fishing outfits, and it was off to the races.

In a sport fueled by machismo and bravado, he is as humble and understated as charter captains come, which might not be saying much — there’s surely no shortage of expletives spouted off on his boat. McMurray’s comportment is as steady and calculated as any captain I ever mated for in my younger days.

“It’s the dumbest business imaginable,” the captain says. “You work your ass off for very little return — failure is part of the algorithm. Whether it’s an unforeseen, catastrophic expense, a pandemic or ridiculously high fuel prices, it’s hard to stay in the black.”

Jigging and popping is the preferred technique aboard McMurray’s boats.

But for skippers like McMurray, the passion breaches upon a level that is more attune with a sickness. “You have to be a real junky to forgo rest and sleep and destroy your disposition, not to mention body,” he says. “You get addicted to the adrenaline and the grind. And then you get PTSD every winter when you don’t have it.”

The crew on this late summer day is a gaggle of local teenagers on a school holiday — each vying for a coveted gig as mate aboard one of McMurray’s five boats. The initial plan had been to scour for early-fall bluefin tuna, which had shown up the previous week and disappeared just as quickly. Fortunately, McMurray’s midsummer bread-and-butter staple of yellowfin are lingering on butterfish and squid.

Having been steady all summer long, the safe bet on a yellowfin bite has every self-proclaimed “skipper” with enough gas money to string together an offshore jaunt carousing the waters along Hudson Canyon looking for life: whales, birds or, perhaps even surer, the “One More Cast” emblems emblazoned on McMurray’s Contender fleet.

You don’t catch fish tied to the dock. 

For more than two hours, the thrum of the outboards had lulled me back to sleep until the Contender slows, jarring us to our feet as first light danced atop a bristling chop. A minke whale’s exhalation 20 yards off the port bow stirs our bleary eyes into scanning mode. A few shearwaters hover here and there, hanging low as they dip and disappear into the troughs. Life begets life — if there are whales around, there are also baitfish. And where you find baitfish, you’ll find tuna.

McMurray lights up, seeing something in the distance that we don’t. He doesn’t lose his gaze or waste a breath bothering to share what his eyes have spotted. He hands me a rod and tells me: “Bow, 12 o’clock.”

I’m seeing nothing but do as I’m told, making my way forward to sling an off-white Madd Mantis popper from an 8-foot Centaur jig-and-pop rod with a massive Daiwa Saltiga 14000 spinning reel. I make a handful of casts. Nothing. Defaulting to palpable, if contented, defeat, McMurray shrugs, and we move along. Rejection resounds when tuna fishing, and might also be precisely what stokes the monkey on a strung-out captain’s back in the throes of it.

Where there are whales, there is bait. Where there is bait, there are tuna. 

There are a number of ways to stalk tuna with rod and reel. Where the rolling, pitching and yawing of anchored chunking or the droning diesels of a trolling sportfisher might lull anglers into a stupor, if not a putrid-green queasiness, the running and gunning of light-tackle jigging and popping is surely the adrenaline-based antithesis.

McMurray’s jig-and-pop junkies are the offshore punk rockers to the trolling and baiting sets’ easy-listening, yacht-rock ilk. A decal plastered about the helms and coolers aboard several of McMurray’s boats reads: “If it were easy, it’d be called trolling.” The sacrifice, however, is not dissimilar. No matter how you dress for battle, to chase tuna is to spend hours upon hours unproductively wishing, hoping and scouring miles of blue water looking for any indication of life. Occasionally you’re interrupted by moments of excitement at the discovery of action and, on particularly good days, connecting.

When the fish are so big you can’t hoist them up for a photo, you know you’ve had a good day. 

Yet we pay dearly for this bluewater lottery ticket. People with no real means stash away thousands of dollars each year to throw it at what might amount to nothing more than a chance to tangle with and sink a gaff into some of the most prized flesh available to humanity. The sight of a yellowfin — a uniquely hot-blooded bombshell — storming a topwater plug and wolfing it down like a Tic-Tac make even bad trips worth the experience. The difference between elation and despair comes at a whim, like a slot machine lighting up.

Tuna schools are scattered and thin today. The wind is light, the electric-blue canyon water as clear as Bombay Sapphire, and the fish we do find are suspicious of our polyurethane-resin and stainless-steel offerings. We nose up behind a group of squid trawlers hauling their nets, and without the captain’s direction (or permission), the kids reach into the live well and fling fistfuls of dead peanut bunker off the stern, forming a slick. Flats of frozen butterfish are pulled out from cold storage, and we’re tripled up within five minutes. McMurray isn’t thrilled and orders the kids to hold off tossing bait after half a dozen fish are landed.

“Poppers only!” he thunders. (His closer fishing acquaintances call him “Thanos,” as he holds an uncanny resemblance to the Marvel Comics supervillain.) More than two decades out of military service, McMurray is starchily stiff, his stature every bit as imposing as the Marvel warlord, down to his almost cartoonishly muscular build, Mr. Clean chrome dome, immaculately trimmed chin puff and booming voice. His orders fall on deaf ears. He throws his hands up, smiles and sits back at the helm as the kids triple up yet again. He’s not pleased that we’ve resorted to chucking meat so early on, but he’s tickled at the giddiness of the teenagers.

When the tuna are feeding on the surface and you get to see the fish bomb a topwater lure, the elation you feel is one of the apex thrills of the fishing life. 

Drags peel, lines cross, and the orchestra of youth is yelping, hooting and hollering every which way across the deck. The smallest angler sticks a large fish that likely outweighs him, and to get better leverage, he moves to the bow. Sensing he’ll take the plunge before ever letting go of the reel handle, my newly minted fatherly instincts take hold — my first son is but a few weeks old, but I feel the need to jump in and assist. I grab him by the back of the shirt to keep him on deck. A few pumps and turns of the reel handle later, and he breaks the fish off. The young man collapses in theatrical anguish. The tuna wins again.

An hour and change into the frenzy, two of the skipper’s three gaffs have been lost overboard. The deck is almost unnavigable in a slick of crimson spattered by the tails of a half-dozen tuna beating on the deck. McMurray calls a timeout to dress and ice the fish.

Fistfuls of peanut bunker are all it takes to keep the school of yellowfin teased up beside the boat. The crew reels in another round of fish, all on bait, save for a few taken on poppers. I, for one, wasn’t going to take my chances with Thanos and pulled in a few on the Madd Mantis. By noon, the hold is as full as the captain will allow, and we’ve released at least a dozen more. With the wind picking up, we decide to hit the bricks and start the 80-mile ride home. The gang, shaking out sore arms and stretching hunched backs, taps out as we embark on a molar-splitting run to Jones Inlet on the south shore of Long Island.

— Subscribe to the Anglers Journal Newsletter —

Tucking into the canals and out of reach of the onshore winds, the late-summer sun is scorching as the center console makes the dock. Stepping off and taking inventory of my gear, I watch the kids pull the six yellowfin out of the ice. McMurray calls on a more experienced mate to put the boat to bed, bids his farewell to us, and beelines it for a hot shower and a place to put up his feet.

The young grommets offer to fill my cooler with as many steaks as will fit, and I indulge. A bit of fresh tuna is about all I can do to appease my partner, who gave me the go-ahead to zip offshore for a day barely a month after giving birth to our son. I can feel the leash of domesticity beginning to tighten as what feels like hours go by while the kids take turns abandoning their stations to chide and jostle one another, reveling in the aftermath of a school holiday well-spent.

As tuna loins are mangled into steaks by dull blades and novice hands, I can’t help getting a rise. These kids had all the time in the world to get it right, and they knew it, but there is no satisfaction so resplendent and decadent as prolonging a day of fishing by lazing around back at the dock, no matter what time you had to wake up or what time you’ll have to grapple to your feet tomorrow and do it again. And like McMurray, as with any creature that has fishing in its bones, every predawn dock time, every spine-crunching canyon run, every blister and every precious drop of combustibles will forever be music to our marrow.