by Capt. Tred Barta
(This article first appeared in the July/August 2007 issue of The Journal)
There are many roads to the “Bigeye Highway.” Some roads start as just a filament of warm water, just a hint of an anomaly suggesting rotation of a warm-core eddy backing off from the Gulf Stream. Some are like country dirt roads in Alabama, dirty, ugly pieces of water leading to cobalt blue lakes butted up to the 100-fathom line. The Bigeye Highway, to those of us infected with the need to chase this species, is also the route to heaven when our time on earth is trolled out.
I have dedicated my life to this North Atlantic fishery and spent most of my life fishing it. Although tuna stocks, catch rate, and size of bigeye catches have declined since the glory days of my youth, the quest for the wolfpack has never burned stronger, and to many modern-day anglers catching one mature bigeye tuna in their lifetime is a goal held above all.
To those youngsters building their careers, where did the term Bigeye Highway come from? Well, Mike Forman, Jamie Hummel of Hampton Bays, Long Island, and I invented the term as we worked the 43300 line and ran it from the Dip
