Adventure off Ambrose

For generations before sunburned bankers and brokers appeared upon the high seas off the New Jersey coast. Block Island and Montauk Point armed with expensive rods & reels, Atlantic market fishermen had been familiar with a hard-headed sea monster with a silver belly, blue-bronze back and corrugated spine. They called him "horse mackerel and cursed him when, bulking 200 to 800 lb. with the power and speed of a steam engine, he barged into their pound nets and tore them up. Rod & reel fishermen taught the commercial men to call the monster by his right name, tuna. "With their sporting tackle they trolled for his little brothers, up to 90 lb. or so, secretly grateful that no real grown-ups hit the bait.

In 1929 that astute big game fisherman, Novelist Zane Grey, traveled from the Pacific coast, where taking big tuna had been studied and solved, to East Jordon Bay, Nova Scotia. There he tied into and landed a 758-lb. "horse mackerel" that set a world's record and started a new fashion in Atlantic game-fishing. Last week, after many cruises and much patient observation, a slim, 22-year-old college boy duplicated Fisherman Grey's feat and came within 93 pounds of the present world's record, with by far the biggest tuna ever landed in U. S. waters, a 705-lb. fish, 9 ft. 3 1/2, in. long, 6 ft. 3 in. around. Scene of action was in the transatlantic steamer lane near Ambrose Lightship, only 23 1/2 mi. from downtown Manhattan.

Big tuna are too lazy to chase a moving bait. Fisherman Francis H. Low knew, when he learned from market fishermen where some big tuna had been sighted, that the thing to do was anchor his 22-ft. seaskiff and put out a chum of ground-up mackerel and mossbunker, bait a huge swordfish hook with a whole mackerel, and sit down to wait. He was eating a sandwich when "the tuna hit like an earthquake and then started out to sea like a torpedo." Fisherman Low braced himself in his leather harness for a fight that, was to last five hours, while his captain quickly hoisted anchor to let the fish tow the skiff around the ocean. For a mile he went out to sea, then turned and ran back, staying mostly on the surface. After an hour and one-half he shook himself so violently that the hook came out of his mouth--but caught again in his side, making him even harder to handle. When he was exhausted he sounded. "Pumping" him up stone dead from the bottom was excruciating labor. A commercial boat's block & tackle was required to hoist the prize finally inboard.

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