LOOKING FOR BIG FISH? : Join the Club : At Catalina’s Tuna Club, They’re Hooked on Tradition

When the Tuna Club of Avalon had its first antique tackle “Linen One” marlin tournament off Santa Catalina Island recently nobody caught a marlin. They used wooden rods with vintage linen line on pre-World War II reels, and some used flying fish for bait, as their grandfathers did, but that wasn’t their handicap.

Thornton Ibbotson of Los Angeles came closest when he hooked a marlin and fought it for 2 1/2 hours before it got away. Ibbotson’s antique tackle, including his nine-thread linen line with a breaking strength of only 26 pounds, held up fine. It was the modern monofilament leader that broke.

Before monofilament, before Kona and long before Cabo--indeed, before marlin was a sportfish--there was the Tuna Club. Sports historians may argue the apocrypha of Naismith’s peach baskets and where baseball really started, but there is little doubt where big-game sportfishing began.

“Big-game sportfishing originated here,” said Barney Ridder, a Tuna Club member. “The first marlin, the first broadbill swordfish were caught right here.”

Charles Frederick Holder, who founded the club in 1898, apparently invented the sport when he first sought big fish with rod and reel in 1887. His target was tuna. That’s why he called it the Tuna Club, because in 1898 sportfishermen using hand-held tackle thought they had as much chance of catching Moby Dick as they did a marlin or a swordfish.

All of this is documented in a bound volume chronicling the club’s first 50 years. There is no mention of Sir Winston Churchill because he didn’t come to get his marlin until 1951, at a cost of little blood, sweat or tears. He needed only 40 minutes before he was back at the club with his trophy. There is a faded, autographed photo in the trophy room, alongside a note from the late British prime minister requesting a copy of the photo for himself to quiet his “doubting friends.”

With the 100th anniversary of the world’s first big-game sportfishing club five years away, preparations are being made to compile a second volume rich with fishing folklore. For now, club historian Mike Farrior of Rancho Santa Fe has reclaimed dozens of old photos and reconditioned much of the old tackle for display in glass cases to create a remarkable museum--which, unfortunately, remains off-limits to the public behind locked, cut-glass doors.

There isn’t any supervision for tours, and members fear the building’s old boards wouldn’t stand the traffic, although some accommodation may be made to celebrate the centennial in 1998.

The first clubhouse was built in 1906 and burned down in 1915. The present two-story structure was built in 1916 and has been renovated recently. In 1991, largely through the efforts of Charlie Davis, one of the 200 members, and Bill Nott, president emeritus of the Sportfishing Assn. of California, the clubhouse received designation as State Historical Landmark No. 997, as well as recognition on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National List of Historic Places.

Those distinctions will protect it from threats of developers appropriating its valuable site at the edge of the water on Avalon Bay.

Over 95 years, some famous people have walked the hardwood floors and relaxed in the library’s green leather-upholstered rocking chairs to laugh and lie after a hard day of fishing. The Tuna Club was sanctuary for some of the early power brokers of Los Angeles, as well as for celebrities such as Stan Laurel, Charlie Chaplin and Hal Roach. But the member most often mentioned is Zane Grey, author of Western classics and several lesser-known books on fishing.

Grey is revered for the prestige he brought the club, if not for the circumstances under which he left it. Although the club was chartered for “gentlemen anglers,” women were not excluded, and in 1926 Mrs. Keith Spaulding caught a broadbill weighing 426 pounds. In a photo with a 165-pound tuna she also caught, Mrs. Spaulding appears to be about 5 feet and 100 pounds. Grey is said to have scoffed, “No way a woman that small could catch a fish that large.”

Club directors told Grey he could either apologize or resign. He apologized--and resigned.

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Such catches formed the foundation for the International Game Fish Assn.’s original list of world records that is universally recognized as the last word in big-game sportfishing achievement. Tuna Club members John Griffith of Newport Beach and Hal Neibling of Long Beach are IGFA trustees for California.

But those kinds of catches are rare in local waters now. The Tuna Club records of 573 pounds for broadbill, by George C. Thomas III in 1927; 405 for marlin, by A.R. Martin in 1932, and 251 for tuna, by Col. C.P. Morehouse in 1899, seem destined to stand forever.

Commercial fishermen, wielding harpoons and assisted by airborne spotters, still harvest broadbill within sight of the landmark casino, but there have been only four catches by rod and reel off the Southern California coast this year. Roy E. (Ted) Naftgzer, a club member for 45 years, has caught 48 in his lifetime--perhaps more than any other sportfisherman--but hasn’t hooked up on one in 13 years.

Tuna Club membership isn’t expensive, compared to most country clubs: an initiation fee of $4,000 and annual dues of $650. But a newcomer is only an associate member, without voting rights, until he subsequently qualifies for full membership with a minimum-size catch of a tuna, marlin or broadbill on linen or dacron line. Catches on monofilament don’t count, and catches must be weighed at Avalon.

Some members have been trying to qualify for years. Club records show why:The resource isn’t what it used to be.

Members’ catches have been logged since 1900. The first marlin was recorded in 1903, the first broadbill in 1913. Tuna peaked with 564 in 1923, then crashed to zero in ‘32-33, with no significant recovery since. Marlin peaked with 771 in ‘31; 49 were checked in last year. There were 27 broadbill in ‘28, with an erratic comeback in the ‘70s, but only six have been recorded after 1978--and only one in the last seven years.

The Tuna Club recognized what was happening as early as 1957, when it started tagging and releasing billfish. It lobbied against commercial fishing around the island as early as 1908.

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Undaunted, 16 Tuna Club members set out on their two-day tournament with their antique tackle. All rods had to be wood, all reels pre-1940--collectors would have drooled over the vom Hoffs, the Coxes and the Pfluegers--and all had to be wound with linen line, which is not sold at Big 5 or Turner’s. Monofilament leaders were OK, albeit Ibbotson’s undoing.

Farrior, Gary Graham of San Diego and Jim Burtle of Long Beach were aboard outgoing president Mike Blower’s twin-dieseled sportfisher Dreadnought.

“We kind of dreamed this up on a porch in Baja,” Graham said. “It was originally a bet.”

Last year Griffith won an informal antique tournament with a single marlin, which he released.

This year, Blower’s son Gary, a new member, was trying to get a qualifying fish, with the help of the Dreadnought’s electronic depth-sounders, fish-finders and navigational wonders.

If they really wanted to be authentic, Blower would have rowed them, as the legendary boatmen like George Farnsworth did for Holder and Col. Morehouse. They would have navigated by landmarks and, when a fish hit, set the hook by rowing like mad and hope they didn’t get towed halfway to Hawaii.

But, like their forebears, they did use flying fish for bait.

“It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen one of those things in the water,” Blower said.

From the time the full moon fell behind the island and the fog turned orange toward the mainland, they trolled and trolled. Shortly after 10 a.m. they saw a marlin breaking the surface near the boat. Blower pounced for a rod already baited with a live mackerel in the bait tank and hurled it out, but the fish was gone.

By 11 a.m. they had seen another “jumper” and a “sleeper” on the surface. Burtle said, “Bring in the flyers.”

Graham agreed. “Put out the iron (jigs).”

They zeroed in on birds feeding on baitfish that something had chased to the surface. They watched another boat near them fight a marlin for 20 minutes before losing it. But they never got a bite.

Did it matter?

Not much.

“I haven’t had a fish hooked up for two years,” Burtle said. “We go out because we love the ocean.”