A veteran Swansboro angler follows a tightly-scripted water dance when he goes for big mackerel.
Capt. Stan Jarusinski can claim the title of being one of the best small-boat king mackerel anglers in the southeastern United States.
He and the crew of his 23-foot Regulator, Mister Stanman, won the two-day Southern Kingfish Association 2005 national championship for boats less than 23 feet in length by landing back-to-back king mackerel, each weighing more than 40 pounds, off the Florida coast during April 2006.
And he recently was inducted into the SKA Hall of Fame in 2007.
Like most professional king mackerel anglers, Jarusinski usually relies upon live bait to catch big kings. Last summer he headed out for a day of king mackerel fishing, launching his boat from the Island Harbor Marina, a private ramp the public can launch from for a fee. Before heading offshore, he navigated west along the Intracoastal Waterway to the N.C. 58 Bridge that connects the mainland to Emerald Isle.
“There’s usually some menhaden schooling at the bridge,” Jarusinski said, his twin 200-horsepower H.D.P.I Yamaha outboards growling. “We’ll try to catch some before we head to the ‘Alphabet’ buoys.”
Jarusinski tried for half an hour to catch menhaden, but none showed on the depth-finder screen or at the surface. Another angler had some luck, inducing Jarusinski to keep trying with his cast net.
However, after 30 minutes, he grew frustrated, packed up his cast net and headed out of Bogue Inlet and into the Atlantic ocean. When it comes to king mackerel fishing, Jarusinski is not a patient man. He goes full blast all the time.
“We can catch jig baits once we get to the Alphabet buoys,” he said. “I can’t stand wasting fishing time trying to catch bait.”
The Alphabet buoys were created by the military, but fish like them as well. Any object in the ocean provides structure for establishing a base for a food chain when organisms attach. Small plants and animals in turn attract baitfish, which in turn attract larger fish, including fabled king mackerel. They also attract lesser-sought game fish such as barracuda, which eat king mackerel and are especially fond of lurking right beneath a buoy or a boat to attack an exhausted king ready for the gaff.
With all the predators abounding, the skittish baitfish hide near the buoy anchors, cables and in the shadows of the buoys.
“We’re looking for sardines and cigar minnows,” he said. “The baitfish are usually upwind of the buoys.
“Look, there they are now.”
Circling upwind of the “D” buoy, he spotted a red mass on his color depth-finder screen. He tied a Sabiki rig to the line of a spinning rod. A 2-ounce sinker carried the trot line of a half-dozen miniature jigs down to the baitfish school, 20 feet below the surface.
Jarusinski jigged the rig a few times then retrieved it. Sardines and cigar minnows, as well as small fish that would have looked great in a decorative aquarium, wriggled on the hooks, attracted by tiny luminous beads that acted as jig heads and bits of feathers a quarter of 1-inch long that dressed tiny gold hooks.
“You have to paint the sinker black to make it less attractive to barracuda,” he said. “They hit the baits too, but they really like to eat the sinkers if they’re shiny.”
Nevertheless the toothy monsters ate a couple of rigs after a few minutes of jigging. Regardless, Jarusinski managed to fill his live well with enough baits for king fishing.
The biggest key to catching tournament-winning king mackerel is having lively live baits. To ensure his baits stay alive and frisky, Jarusinski takes great pains to be sure his live well is oxygenated and calm. He said turbulence and lack of oxygen are what makes most king mackerel baits lose their attractiveness after only a few hours in the live well.
“I learned about rigging live wells the hard way,” Jarusinski said. “I lost all of my bait in my third tournament.
‘The menhaden were looking so bad by noon I had to head inshore to catch some more. It was only a 5-mile trip. But when I got there, I couldn’t catch any menhaden. Everybody else at the spot we left caught money fish.”
While in-deck live wells work for half-day fishing, tournament fishing requires after-market rigging. Boat construction techniques usually result in built-in live wells with corners.
“The biggest secret is having a large, round live well,” Jarusinski said. “I have a 50-gallon round live well under my leaning post.”
Baitfish such as menhaden swim in circles. Wherever there’s a corner, they crowd, rubbing off slime against one another and bumping their noses, getting what anglers call “red nose.”
Jarusinski’s built-in live well has one pump to bring water in and another to pump it out. But the add-on tank has one pump to bring water in through a through-hull fitting with a clamshell cover in the bottom of the boat. The water discharges by gravity, and the discharge port has a plastic cover. The cover has holes drilled into it to allow just enough outflow to keep the tank from overflowing. The pump base also has a built-in oxygen infuser to aerate the water.
“I use a KeepAlive oxygen infuser that pumps outside air in with the water, making bubbles so tiny you can hardly see them,” he said. “They just turn the water milky.”
The pump has a capacity of 1,100 gallons per hour but is regulated with a valve to change water in the tank 5 to 7 times per hour. The infuser airflow is also adjustable.
“A lot of fishermen rig high-capacity pumps, but you don’t want a lot of water pressure,” Jarusinski said. “The more water movement, the quicker the baitfish get stressed, lose their slime and die.”
Keeping the oxygen level high is one way to reduce stress. But a simpler way is using a clear live well cover.
“I replaced the factory cover with a clear cover,” he said. “If you have an opaque cover and open it, the baitfish go crazy because it startles them. But with the clear cover, they get used to seeing us moving around the boat.
“They’re so calm, I reach in and pick them up with my hand without using a net.”
Having backup plans and redundant bait systems are important. With so much money at stake for a few hours fishing, losing bait due to equipment failure is not an option.
“I change the live well pump every year,” Jarusinski said. “Pumps run a finite number of hours then they quit. At only $90 to change the pump and diffuser, it isn’t worth taking a risk.
“If something does go wrong with the pump, I drop my wash-down hose into the tank to keeping seawater flow going for a few minutes while I change the pump. I always carry a spare.”
While the live-well pump is the most important piece of electronics, it’s very low-tech compared to other electronics bristling from Stanman’s console; it’s full of high-tech equipment.
“I have a VHF radio and a multi-function unit with GPS, color depth-finder, plotter and mapping capabilities,” he said. “There’s a backup black-and-white depth-finder that shows things the color depth-finder doesn’t.”
Dual batteries power the electronic equipment. The motors have high-output alternators to keep batteries charged.
To spread the lines while trolling, Jarusinski uses down-riggers. Instead of out-riggers, he sets lines from rod holders on the T-top. Out-riggers would take up too much room on such a small boat.
“I have two Scotty down-riggers,” he said. “On the down-riggers, I use Black’s release clips, which are out-rigger style release clips, extending from the down-rigger line with 36 inches of coated, 200-pound cable. I use 200-pound superbraid line on the down-riggers because it’s thin, doesn’t whine like wire or create friction or bubbles.
“I’ve had sharks attracted to down-rigger wire eat the down-rigger weights.”
As important to live-bait fishing success as the live well is the live-bait rig. There are as many variations of a live-bait rig as there are king mackerel fishermen.
“I use the straight wire leaders instead of circular wire,” he said. “I loop the rigs to put them in plastic zipper bags. But they straighten back out when you take them out to fish with them.
“I use a swivel tied to 3-feet of No. 3 American Tournament Straight Fishing Wire. Then, depending on the size of the bait, a 1/0, 2/0 or 3/0 Gamakatsu live-bait hook that goes into the nose of the bait.
“I use a No. 4 wire to tie a 4x, No. 4 treble Gamakatsu treble hook for the dropper off the nose hook. For additional hooks, for instance when hooking a ribbonfish as bait, I adds 4x, No. 6 treble hooks spaced 5 inches apart.”
The swivel is tied to 30 feet of Yo-zuri disappearing pink, 20-pound-test fluorocarbon leader, which is tied to 15-pound-test mono fishing line with a surgeon’s knot.
Jarusinski’s rods are 7-foot medium-light action with roller guides. His lines are Yo-zuri hybrid monofilament with the top lines high-visibility yellow and down-rigger lines purple-smoke color.
“The yellow lines let me see where the top baits are running,” Jarusinski said. “But the purple disappears underwater so the fish don’t see it. Anything you can do to give you an edge might just hook up that big fish you need to win a tournament.”
Besides trolling with live baits, Jarusinski also fishes with deep-diving lures. He said he puts lots of kings in the boat fast with the faster trolling lures.
“From the first time I tried them, I couldn’t believe how effective the Yo-zuri deep divers were,” he said. “I’ve used them effectively for yellowfin tuna, and they really catch king mackerel.”
When he’s using live baits, Jarusinski trolls them as slowly as he can go and still make a little forward progress. But he said slow-trolling live baits also had disadvantages.
“When you troll live menhaden at 500 rpms, they can tangle and wrap the lines around the down-rigger cables,” he said. “If it’s a bit windy or rough and the going is slow, you can troll deep divers at 1,000 rpms and cover more water.
“I use a 3-foot No. 4 single-strand wire leader and a 35-pound Spro swivel. I troll them at the coral bottoms around C and D buoys.”
When using the deep-diving lures, Jarusinski puts out no more than 30 to 40 feet of line. He lets out enough line until he feels the lure digging into the water.
“If you put too much line out, the lures will pop up and out of the water,” he said. “It’s the most amazing thing that a big king will strike a diving lure trolled right in the prop wash. But lots of times, the closer to the boat the lure is, the faster a big king will hit it.”
When Jarusinski gets a king mackerel on the line, he or whomever is the angler, heads to the bow of the boat. That way, whichever way the king runs, it’s easy to follow it with the rod to keep the line from rubbing against the boat.
“It’s a coordinated effort,” he said. “The angler can communicate with the helmsman or the gaff man can relay what’s going on to the helmsman. If the angler keeps the reel clicker on everyone can tell what the fish is doing because they can hear what’s going on all the time.”
The fish is played with just enough drag to keep the spool from slipping.
Jarusinski likes to keep the line between the rod grip and his finger to feel the fish when it’s near the boat. He applies pressure or lets off the line if the fish makes a run.
He boated several king mackerel in a couple hours of fishing. But one was lost to a barracuda.
“If you see the barracuda, you can crank down the drag and try to get the king to the boat, but it usually doesn’t work,” he said. “You’re better off to keep moving farther and farther from the buoys until the barracuda leave your fish alone.”
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