The reel jammed into my chest is spinning at 100 revolutions per minute and could probably break my fingers if I was stupid enough to grab for it. Now, the fish is not coming gently back to our point of contact, and my forearm is going numb. I am most decidedly not in Pennsylvania anymore, trying to entice a jump out of a 10-inch trout. I have driven 550 miles straight through from Lancaster to this remote barrier island on North Carolina's Crystal Coast to tackle an improbable match-up. Our quarry is an ocean fish long despised by those who fish for a living.
False albacore look like their giant tuna cousins, but they are inedible.
They were considered a trash fish until someone discovered you could hook one on a fly rod. The fish, which range from 5 to 20 pounds, hit a fly savagely, run like a fleeing bull and dig in their mighty fins and forked tails every inch of the way back to the boat. Each fall, from late October through December, fly fishers descend here from all over the globe. Around the turn of the 20th century, the island was a supply line for a whaling village that operated on a nearby barrier island. Pushed in the fall by dominant northeast winds and cooler ocean temperatures, albies move into the calm waters here in search of schools of bait fish.