By the next morning we were just west of Grays Harbor. We passed the Columbia Bar without incident. In northern Oregon we began seeing tuna trollers, so we put out 2 hand lines and over the next few hours lost 4 expensive lures. I put longer and “stretchier” bungy cords on the lines to absorb the shock of the strike and soon hooked a 15 pound “Big Eye” tuna. Without a fish cleaning table, we cleaned and filleted the tuna on deck, with fish blood running everywhere. Lare’s expensive jacket was covered in blood (Vicki Byers later found that she couldn’t get the blood out of the jacket.) (This is Vicki S: I tried to ignore what was going on the deck. I’ve never seen a fish that big cleaned and gutted. But they did a great cleaning job. You can’t even tell a fish was cleaned on the deck.)

Now the tally - 13 small tuna steaks
Cost: 4 lost lures ($40) + 1 sailing jacket ($150)

By nightfall we found that we had found the mother lode of Albacore tuna, as indicated by a gathering of the every tuna troller in the Pacific Ocean. We were surrounded by tuna trollers in the dark. At one time we counted 15 radar targets surrounding us, in a small patch of ocean, and navigating through them was a challenge. Apparently Albacore Alley was a small area, because the boats trolled back and forth in short zig-zags. As soon as we set a course to avoid a troller, it changed course.
We soon found that it is difficult to judge distance at night. The boats all illuminate the working deck with lights of varying intensity. Through optical illusion, boats with bright deck lights appeared close and those with dim lights appeared to be far away. We found ourselves trying to avoid a collision with a brightly lit boat that the radar showed to be a mile away, while getting too close to a dimly lit boat that was very near. Eventually we cleared Albacore Alley and found ourselves out in open ocean with no other boats within the 36 mile radius of the radar.