“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.
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
